Category: Powershell

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PowerShell: Looping Through a List of Servers and Copying Files

I’m new to Windows PowerShell and have been wanting to learn it for some time now.  I finally had a situation come up the other day that I thought might be a good excuse to sit down and write my first PowerShell script.

The scenario:

I have three different servers running the same application.  There is application data on each server that needs to be backed up and stored in a folder named in a date format but it is not necessarily the date the script is run. 

The folder structure is exactly the same on each server.  I needed a script that could make a new folder to store the backed up data. 

I prompt the user to name the new folder defined on 3 different servers and copy files from another folder to this new folder, essentially creating a backup of data from a root folder to the new folder.

PowerShell Script Example: Looping through a list of servers

#  Script name:    Backup_Data.ps1
#  Created on:     2010-05-14
#  Author:         Rick Cable
#  Purpose:        Backup Files

#new folder name in date format mm-dd-yy
$NewFolderName = "" #Stores the name of the folder 
#Create array of Servers
$Servers = @("Server1","Server2","Server3")
$ServerName = @("Server 1 Description","Server 2 Description","Server 3 Description")

#Prompt user to enter the new folder name
$NewFolderName = read-Host "Enter the name of the new folder in date format mm-dd-yy"

#Function to process the files for each server in the array list.
Function Backup {

#Loop throug each of the servers
for ($i = 0; $i -le $Servers.length -1; $i++) 
{
write-Host $Servers[$i]
$BasePath = "\\" + $Servers[$i] + "\Share\"
$DonePath = $BasePath + "\Backup\" + $NewFolderName + "\"

if (test-Path $DonePath)  'if folder already exists
{        
write-Host "Copying files for" $ServerName[$i]
$FilePath = $BasePath + "*.dfm"
Copy-Item $FilePath $DonePath
write-Host "Copying log files"
$FilePath = $BasePath + "*.log"
Copy-Item $FilePath $DonePath
write-Host "Copying txt files"
$FilePath = $BasePath + "*.txt"
Copy-Item $FilePath $DonePath

write-Host "Files Copied"
} 
else
{
[IO.Directory]::CreateDirectory($DonePath)

write-Host "Copying files for" $ServerName[$i]
$FilePath = $BasePath + "*.dfm"
Copy-Item $FilePath $DonePath
write-Host "Copying log files"
$FilePath = $BasePath + "*.log"
Copy-Item $FilePath $DonePath
write-Host "Copying txt files"
$FilePath = $BasePath + "*.txt"
Copy-Item $FilePath $DonePath

write-Host "Folder Created and Files Copied"
}

}
}

#Run the function   
Backup