Backup folder structure (structure only, not actual file content)

Question

Looking for software to work under windows to backup the structure of folders. By structure of folders, I imagine choosing (a number of) folder(s) and this program would save the name of this folder and the name of all subfolders, and their subfolders, and so on (preserving the structure of those folders, i.e. which subfolder belonged to which parent folder).

Extra features I would like to see are:

• Scheduling function, running the above every x number of days, so the backup is always fairly recent.
• Including file names, the backup would include the names of the files in each folder (not the actual files, only their names)

Answer 1

You may want to try robocopy, which is onboard with windows:

robocopy src dest /create /mot:20

The above command copies the directory structure below "src" into "dest" including file names but without content due to the "create" switch (creates zero length files).

The "mot" option causes robocopy to monitor the file system for changes and in the above example reruns the backup 20 minutes after the next change.

Alternatively you could just setup an automatic task in windows using the task scheduler, and have that call robocopy repeatedly without the "mot" switch (can run without even being logged in).

Answer 2

Install python and then use the os.walk library to document the structure to a text file or create a matching set of directories on the server.