Put Your Laptop SD Card Slot to Use, Create Backups

Backups are generally created on the following media:

- DVD/R
- External USB flash devices
- External USB HDD

A laptops SD card slot generally goes unused. Mounting an external USB flash device takes over a USB port and can break if you forget to unplug the device.

I've been experimenting in creating one click backups on a SD flash card, with great results! The greatest advantage is that you do not tie up a USB port and the SD card does not need to be ejected at all.

- Stick in a SD card
- Create a batch script that runs the backup either manually or invoked through a task/CRON schedule

The following script executes winrar with command line parameters and dumps the ZIP onto the SD card.

-- Begin Copy and Paste --

@ echo off
echo Kill a running app
taskkill /f /im APP_NAME_HERE.exe

echo cd into the winrar directory
c:
cd progra~1\winrar\

echo Run winrar
winrar a f:\ -r -afrar -m1 -rr -rv -t -ilog -ag+bck-MMM-DD_YYYY__NNN -x@F:\exclude-dirs.txt F:\SOURCE

echo Copy .ZIP to the SD Card, h:\ is the SD destination
copy /v f:\bck-*.rar h:\

pause

-- End Copy/Paste --

Dump the above contents into a .bat file and voila!

Requirements:

SD/MMC/MS Card - newegg.com
Winrar or Winzip
Laptop, duh!