Losing your valuable files as a result of a hard drive failure, virus attack or even accidental file deletion can be very devastating. Whether it’s your photos, giant music collection, important documents - data loss is always costly and stressful. Hard drives always crash, it’s just a matter of time, therefore DO regular backups. Especially when there are so many free backup software options that can run regular backups automatically. Just set it once to run scheduled backups every week or so and forget about them. Then when disaster happens you will be able to restore your files in no time.
Comodo Backup is an excellent backup utility from the creators of Comodo Firewall. It’s free, easy to use and have everything you might need. You can easily backup your local files and folders to anywhere on your computer, network, DVD / CD or even FTP server. Plus it can be set to run automatically on specified time intervals.
Comodo has different backup modes: copy, move and synchronization. So apart from simply copying/moving the files from one place to another you can set Comodo to keep source and backup copy synchronized. That is to say, whenever you make some changes to the original files the changes will be replicated on your backup copy.
There are plenty of other cool features including rule-based file filtering, incremental backups, backup scheduling, backup archiving and email notifications.
Hinx Backup Easy doesn’t have that many features as the one above but if you’re looking for a simple automated backup tool it’s a worthy candidate. Similar to Comodo, Backup Easy also allows you to backup files to a local drive or FTP server. There is also a scheduler to run backups on a regular basis. Backup Easy can do both full and incremental backups. In the latter case, it runs full backup only once, every backup afterwards just changes the files that were modified since last backup.
The program can run on all Java-supported systems. If you’re on Windows, simply download the installer and run it. The installation is automatic. For OS’s other than Windows, download the file, unzip it, and run the executable jar file.
SyncBack - We have already covered the SyncBack backup tool earlier, you can read about it here. Basically, it’s another backup software. Although the app has both free and paid versions, the free one has enough features for running local backups.
The above tools are handy for running hard drive backups to another partition, external drives or your own FTP server. However if you want to backup only a handful of files and store them on reliable third party servers then you can try a free online backup service called Mozy. It’s quick to configure, fully automated and available both for Mac and Windows PCs. The only problem is that the free account gives you only 2 GB of storage space. See all Mozy features here.
An even better alternative is DropBox, however since it’s still in beta, you will have to wait for the next round of invites before you can get in. With DropBox you’re also able to access your files from other PCs, keep them synchronized across multiple computers and even keep a detailed log of all changes made to the file and restore it to an earlier version. Quite useful for people who work from multiple locations.
That’s about it. If you’re interested here are some more backup related articles that we did in the past:
As usual, if you’re aware of some good free backup software that weren’t mentioned here please let us know in comments.
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Filed Under: Cool Software Apps ¦ Lists of tools
Tags: backup, files, security
I think Ace Backup deserves mention.
http://www.acebackup.com/
You missed out Mozy BackUp - which gives you something like 1-2 GB of free storage space online, just use their really simple backup software and you can backup whatever files you want. You could of course use their premium feature but you have to pay for that (you get more space).
I don’t usually endorse these types of service, but Mozy is great and for me it was most important that they were reliable, and credible and secure - and Mozy seems to take privacy pretty good. I found them in PC Magazine and Times. The only problem I have with them is that right now you need to use their software to make backups (restores can be done without the software) but right now my OS is a tightly optomized version so its missing the net framework which I can’t install (Tiny XP), so the Mozy software can’t be installed properly or won’t work - which just plain sucks because I can’t backup my stuff right now until I reinstall my OS.
But for most people that’s probably not a problem.
Hey, I didn’t miss it…
You’ve forgot Cobian Backup - the true No1
I’ve got a few DropBox invites to share. If you want one just send me an email at invite (at) computersoup.co.cc and I’ll send you an invite. P.S. I use DropBox all the time and really like it.
hit me up for dropbox invites too if you’d like at my s/n via gmail
+1 for Cobain Backup
wow, i am really excited in your explanation about this software and i am waiting for your next blog
this is very useful for me and i hope you will continue this in future also
A fantastic backup add-on for Firefox that will backup all your add-ons and extensions is called FEBE.
I heard both good and bad things about FEBE. Probably more bad things than good ones. I prefer MozBackup
Cobian “amanita” forever
links to mozy are broken.
Thanks for heads up, they are fixed now!