Click here to Skip to main content
65,938 articles
CodeProject is changing. Read more.
Articles
(untagged)

Backup Utility in C#

0.00/5 (No votes)
4 Aug 2003 4  
A utility to backup directories and stick a datestamp on the folder, and remove folders older than N days, where N is configurable.

Sample Image - backup.gif

Introduction

During a development project, I realized I needed something to backup my solutions every night, and be tagged with a date stamp. I looked around the Net for some DOS utilities but none really fitted the bill as far as what I was looking for. Eventually, I decided to just code it. Turned out to be super simple in C#.

Goal

My goal was to backup my solution from a source folder (e.g. C:\Data) to a backup folder (e.g. C:\Backup\Data_080403). I also wanted to only keep N number of days of backups and not let my backup folder grow infinitely. So, for instance, I wanted to keep 30 days worth of backups at most. So, whenever, any files older than 30 days were discovered, I wanted the system to delete them automatically.

Solution

I used the System.IO's Directory and DirectoryInfo classes to create folders, delete folders, and wrote a method to recursively copy folders from one location to the next. I utilized the DirectoryInfo class to figure out how old a given folder was, in order to delete it.

License

This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here