Our computers and the data they contain have become an integral part of our lives. 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 keep an update copy of all your important files. A good backup program will allow an average user to easily set up an effective backup, by providing things like check boxes for back up "My Outlook Mail," "My Documents," "My Music," "My Favorites" "Windows Registry" etc. A good program will also have support for storing your backups on numerous different media types, such as, USB drives, CDs and DVDs, and perhaps even FTP support so you can use web storage solutions.
While there are 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.
Out of the 14 free products I looked at, I've only found one program that I feel happy recommending to average users. This program is WinBackup V1.86 from Uniblue Systems. Although it is 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 users might later upgrade to the newest version. However, the old program is good enough that most users probably won't need to.
WinBackup has 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 back up to any drive 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. It has a built in scheduler that will run backups automatically. The feature list goes on and on.
There are a few things 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 as to cause 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 is a potential problem.
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 while basic, it is totally reliable. When I say basic I mean it, as there's not even a restore feature! However, it's used by thousands of organizations and individual users, and has the advantage 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. Furthermore, it allows you to annotate each copy so that your revisions are fully documented. I tried it and it works well, although I suggest 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 Best Freeware category Best Free Folder Synchronization Utility as "sync" utilites can be use in a similar manner as Backup Programs. Still another choice would be a Drive Imaging program that is capable of making a clone of an entire hard or partition.
WinBackup
Website: http://www.liutilities.com/
Download link: http://www.winsite.com/bin/Info?27000000036770
Alternative Download link: http://www.filefactory.com/file/d6ff2f/
Free version: 1.86
License: Freeware
Download File Size: 4.2MB
Operating Systems Supported: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista
Additional Software Required: None
64 Bit Capable: Unknown
Portable Version Available: No
Non-English Languages Supported: None
Cobain Backup
Website: http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm
Current Version: 8.4.0.202 (9.1 Beta Available)
License: Freeware
Download File Size: 9MB
Operating Systems Supported: Windows 95/98/ME/2000/XP/2003/Vista
Additional Software Required: For Win 95 "Windows Sockets v.2" is required
64-Bit Capable: Unknown
Portable Version Available: Yes
Non-English Languages Supported: Some Translations in Progress
FileHampster
Website: http://www.mogware.com/FileHamster/
Download Link: http://www.mogware.com/FileHamster/downloads/index.html
Current Version: 1.5.2.0
License: Freeware
Download File Size: 4.8MB
Operating Systems Supported: Windows 2000/XP/Vista
Additional Software Required: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
64-Bit Capable: No
Portable Version Available: Yes (Note: MS .NET 2.0 must be installed on host machine.)
Non-English Languages Supported: None