Within, i’ll present a free and low-pain solution to implement a backup copy method for Windows using an external hard disk. The same method could also be used for backups over the network.
A user at a customer of mine needed a way to copy his documents to an external disk which is easy and cheap. While it would be possible to use Windows backup, it’s not the nicest of programs to work with (he’s on Windows XP, the backup software on Win7 is probably much nicer), so i decided against it.
My requirements were:
- Simplicity – easy to use for the user
- Unobtrusive – doesn’t require complex installs to the computer which may be against the company IT policy
- Open – doesn’t lock out the user if the backup program fails or goes out of date
- Maintainable – even if i went away, somebody else could update and maintain the system
So with some painful research, i ended up with the Toucan backup Portable App. In fact, i had done an installation like this before but with less elegance, which is to say that i will here spare you from some lack-of-elegance. Not bad.
The whole method is based on example code from the Toucan help files.
Step 0: A wee bit of theory (won’t hurt … much)
We’re going to create two backup routines. One will create a full backup of a source directory onto a target directory on a removable disk. The other one will create an archive containing all files that have changed since the last full backup. Both of these are created with Toucan’s differential backup. Five full backup files will be kept and automagically cleaned out when a full backup is performed. Everything is configurable and probably also schedule-able.
Step 1: Preparation
The first thing to do is to give the external hard disk a persistent mapping. With the external hard disk plugged in, right click My Computer, choose Manage, select the Disk management tool. Right click the external disk, choose Change Drive Letter and Paths and select a nice and backup-friendly letter, say Q.
Then, get the Toucan Portable App. Toucan portable is designed to run within the PortableApps framework but it’ll work nice by itself. By design, that means it will run without making any changes on your system, and we’ll use that to actually run Toucan from the external disk itself. If you want the PortableApps framework, go ahead. It won’t hurt. Much 
Install Toucan on the external disk, Q:. Due to the PortableApps framework, it’ll install in some directory structure underneath the root of Q. Navigate to the Toucan executable and run it.
Step 2: Configure what to back up
The Toucan user interface is a bit scary, but don’t worry. I’ll keep you company until we’re ready to run. Click on the Backup tab. Click the big plus-sign button in the Job Name box to create a new Job. Give the job the name Full backup. In the Type box, select Differential (which may seem misleading but bear with me).
From the big area on the left, select one directory (or even one whole disk, but that’s going to be a lot to backup) you want backed up. I suggest you choose a reasonably small hierarchy to start with, otherwise the testing phase will take some time. Press the plus-sign button in the middle of the screen to have that directory added to your backup list. Unfortunately, Toucan doesn’t support differential backups on multiple source directories. If you want that, you’ll need to repeat this article multiple times. But there are worse pains than that.
In the Backup Location text box, enter @backupfolder@\ (we’ll get to that shortly – oh, and don’t miss that backslash \ at the end of @backupfolder@ as it’s probably important).
Press the Save button which is in the Job Name box.
Step 3: The automagic bits
Click the Variables tab. Click the plus-sign button to create a variable. Name it backupfolder. You’ll get two lines of text in the big box below, one being your computer’s name. Double click that one and enter Q:\backup (or @drive@\backup which would be the cooler and more portable notation). Click the save button.
Click the Script tab. Press the plus-sign button and name a script Backup-rotational. Paste the following into the edit window:
Delete "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-5.zip"
Rename "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-4.zip" "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-5.zip"
Rename "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-3.zip" "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-4.zip"
Rename "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-2.zip" "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-3.zip"
Rename "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-1.zip" "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-2.zip"
Rename "@backupfolder@\BaseFile.zip" "@backupfolder@\BaseFile-1.zip"
Backup "Full backup"
Press the save button.
Yeah, i know it’s ugly, but the Toucan scripting language is just about that developed. It does get worse though.
Anew, press the plus-sign button and create another script. Call it Diff-backup. The only code it will have is:
Backup "Full backup"
Press the save button.
Step 4: Intermediate testing
Still within the Script tab, select the Backup-rotational script and press Run. You should get a few warnings that there aren’t any BaseFile-n.zip files to delete or rename but the backup bit should work fine. The jolly magic here which we couldn’t really influence is that when Toucan runs a differential backup but there is no file to “different against”, it will save the full backup into the file BaseFile.zip.
A reasonably big hierarchy will backup in 15 minutes, a smaller one in a minute or so. If there were severe errors, check your code. If it matches mine, there must be a bug in my code, which you should remark about in the comments section below.
When the Backup-rotational script has run, choose the Diff-backup script and run that. If you want to, you can make some changes to the source hierarchy before running the Diff-backup to see some reality in the process.
Step 5: Enter Batman
You’ll still need two batch files to make the whole magic run. In the directory where Toucan.exe is installed, create the following two files with the contents below:
do-full-backup.cmd
del Q:\backup\20*.zip Toucan Script "Backup-rotational"
do-diff-backup.cmd
Toucan Script "Diff-backup"
The sad bit is that you need to delete the incremental files from the batch file, as Toucan doesn’t expand wildcards (caveat: this script only works in the 3rd millennium Gregorian time – if you’re reading this in another time zone, please edit your script to suite).
Run the two batch files. Watch the output and observe what happens in your backup directory.
Step 6: Shortcuts or schedules
Add shortcuts to your user’s desktop or set a schedule using your favourite cron replacement. Educate said user to run those shortcuts on a regular basis.
Step 7: Restoring files (this should never happen)
In case Bad Things happen, go to the backup directory of your external hard disk. Check out the BaseFile.zip (or an older BaseFile-n.zip if you realize the Bad Thingness only weeks later) or the relevant timestamp-named file if the Bad Thing just happened. Navigate and restore. Take a bow.
You’re done.
I was informed by 
, and i think a Chumby is well suited to become one once i decide what one or two things it is supposed to do well. Now it’s more a twitter-like miracle that you can do anything with and hence there’s not really anything to do with it well. No focus, so to say. The only thing i’ve done so far is to ssh into it and create a cron script that switches between night mode and day mode at 22:00 and 7:00 respectively. But once i come up with something, i’ll surely let you know. 
