I have 3 internal drives on my PC that I like to keep backed up to a single, larger external drive. So I have drive C, D, E as internal drives, and then on my external drive, F, I keep folders labeled “C”, “D”, “E” and they just contain back ups of all the files on those respective drives.

I’ve been keeping this up to date manually, copying the entire drives over every so often, but I’d like to automate this and make it a nightly thing. Is this possible to do with a .bat file? What would that look like? I don’t have a ton of experience with batch scripting. How would I schedule it to run nightly?

From some cursory searching it looks like xcopy is what I’d be looking for. Is it possible to give it parameters so that it won’t copy files that haven’t changed (to save disk write cycles)? Also is there any way to capture the deleted files and remove them from the backup? So if I delete a file from my C drive it would also be deleted from the “C” folder on my backup drive.