Back in the days before a graphical backup utility was included with Windows, the XCOPY command line tool handled this job. XCOPY is still a great tool for backing up files and folders to an alternate location, and supports a large number of switches to control everything from overwriting files to whether the archive attribute should be changed during the process.
The XCOPY command also supports wildcard characters such as * to allow you to select files with certain names or extensions in a single command. As an example, to back up all files in the c:\documents directory that have changed since October 28, 2005 to a directory called e:\backup, the correct syntax would be XCOPY c:\documents e:\backup /D:10-28-2005.
