Our computers and the data they contain have become an integral part of our lives If you're like me, your hard drives are full of important emails and documents, cherished digital photos, your favorite music downloads, and maybe even a few family videos. Unfortunately, this data that is so valuable can be lost in an instant because of a hard drive failure. Viruses, power surges, overheating, hard impacts or vibrations, even theft, are just a few of the things that can cause our precious data to disappear suddenly without warning. To prevent such losses, it is vital to backup your data files regularly in a safe location.
Backup programs help you by making it easy to keep an updated copy of all your important files. A good backup program will allow the average user to easily set up an effective backup by providing features such as check boxes for backup of "My Outlook Mail," "My Documents," "My Music," "My Favorites", "Windows Registry" and other commonly backed-up data. A good program will also provide support for storing your backups on various media types, such as USB drives, CDs and DVDs, and may even provide FTP support so you can take advantage of web storage solutions.
While there is a proliferation of backup programs offered on the net, it's hard to find a decent commercial one (let alone a free one) because so many have glaring deficiencies or are too difficult for the average user.
Of the 14 free products I've looked at, I've found only one program that I'm happy to recommend to average users. This program is WinBackup V1.86 from Uniblue Systems. Although it's no longer available from the vendor's site, the program file "winbackupfreedr.exe" can still be downloaded from a number of sites. It's actually an older version of a current commercial product. The vendor is offering the older version for free with the hope that users might upgrade at some later time to the newest version. However, the old program is good enough that most users probably won't need to.
WinBackup provides a Wizard to help users setup their backup and recovery operations. It has handy check boxes for commonly backed up items, and a lot of flexibility for adding specific data sets to those standard items. It can also backup to any drive that is recognized by Windows, including network drives, and most importantly it will backup to a CD/DVD without the need for third-party packet driver software. It supports compression and encryption and provides backup-data validation as well, and has a built-in scheduler that will run backups automatically. The feature list goes on and on.
There are a few things that users of WinBackup should be aware of, however. First, it backs up in a proprietary format, which means you can't read the data without having a copy of WinBackup on hand. This won't worry many users, but I find it to be an annoyance. Second, it had trouble reading deeply nested directory structures. Worse still, it reacted to the problem by just hanging, which necessitated a system reboot. Many users probably won't have data nested so deep that it causes a problem, but be aware that this can happen. Third, it occasionally missed a scheduled backup, and worse, it didn't warn me. I'm still unsure why. Indeed, it may be a problem specific to my setup. But again, be aware that this may be a potential problem for you as well.
These reservations aside, WinBackup V1.86 gets my top recommendation as the best free data backup program available. It's not up to the standard of the best commercial products, but will still meet the needs of many average users.
Another alternative is Cobian Backup. It's been around for quite a while, and although it's basic, it is totally reliable. When I say basic I mean it, because there's not even a restore feature! However, it's used by thousands of organizations and individual users, and has the advantage of a strong user community. There's a Unicode version that only works with Windows NT and later, and a second version that doesn't support Unicode, but works with all Windows versions.
For simple backup of your working files you might like to check out FileHampster. It automatically time stamps and stores copies each time you save, and it allows you to annotate each copy so that your revisions are fully documented. I tried it and it works well, although I suggest that you watch the quick start tutorial before using it. There are some nice plug-ins, too, including one that allows you to use a third party file comparison program, such as WinMerge, to view the differences between versions.
You might also want to check out the category Best Free Folder Synchronization Utility, because "sync" utilites can be used in a manner similar to Backup Programs. Still more choices can be found in the category Best Free Drive Imaging Program because these products are capable of making a clone of an entire hard drive or partition.
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