Isn't there a simple XCopy backup utility?

I bought an external hard drive yesterday. A Lacie 500 GB USB 2.0 drive for just 199 Euro. But now I'm struggling to find the kind of backup utility I want. I copied several directories, for example the My Documents directory to the new drive. But in the future I would just want to copy the new or changed files. I can do that by opening a DOS window and typing something like
xcopy "C:\Documents and Settings\Tobold\My Documents" F:\My_Docs /S /D /I /Y
but I would need to type that command for every directory I want to back up. Even in a batch file that isn't very user-friendly. I'd like some sort of utility which does such an incremental backup copy with a few clicks to select the directories. And I can't find the right one.

The problem is that most backup utilities refuse to simply copy files. They all want to pack the files into one big zip archive or something similar. The built-in Windows XP backup wizard creates .bkf files. Many other backup utilities use other form of proprietary archive files. I don't want that. The external hard drive is big enough to hold the files to be backed up withing zipping them. And I don't want to run into problems where when I want to restore a file, I absolutely need the same software that I used to archive. I just want to make an incremental copy which leaves the files as they are and is easy to not only restore, but also to copy to other computers.

Can anyone here recommend an incremental copy utility that doesn't pack files into archives but leaves them as they are?
- posted by Tobold @ 7:42 AM Permanent Link