Virtual Backup Using MATLAB

Backup Utility

Description

This is a utility to "Virtually" backup all your data (files and folders, hidden and not hidden). Now what I mean by being virtually is that the backed up data won't have the actual file contents, but will be almost zero sized but with full file extension and all directories as they are in the source directory/drive. So, it's a useful backup utility when you have alternate source to re-get the lost data, if lost.

How the Idea came: Well I am having lots of music files and albums and was scared to lose them, and doing actual backup of such large data isn't possible. For a directory sized 183 GB containing music, video and other files in external hard drive, having 29835 files in 2301 directories took 155 seconds for the virtual backup. The Backup directory when zipped yields a zipped image file sized just 7.64 MB, small enough to be kept in computer.

This is also nice utility when you have to search something on an external hard drive; you can do the same search on the zipped image file and save that extra time on connecting the drive.

There are two version of codes uploaded: First Version makes exact copy of the source directory/drive and Second version does the same as first one plus zips the image.

And Guess What! You can backup the whole drive i.e. an entire partition!

So, hoping this will be useful to someone out there.

*Screenshot taken from: http://webserver.computoredge.com/editorial/2646/in1print.htm*

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.8 (R2009a)
• Other Files: license.txt, ; Readme.txt, ; virtual_backup.m, ; virtual_backup_with_zipping.m