When is the last time you heard someone say “Oh no, why did I back up that file?” My bet would be “never”. Backing up is one thing almost nobody regrets, and Backup4all Professional is one way to get serious about it.

This week, we’re giving away 25 copies of Backup4all Professional worth over $1200 in total. Join the giveaway after the jump.

Backup4all Professional lets you save your files locally, to a network share on your LAN, to an FTP server, or to an SFTP (Secure FTP) server. You can create a new backup with an easy-to-use Wizard:

Or, if you know what you’re doing and don’t need any hand-holding, you can switch over to Advanced mode:

Each backup job can have a single destination: You cannot use the same job to back up both to an FTP server and the local hard drive. You can, however, easily create a copy of a job. So you can configure the sources and filters for one job, and then create a copy and assign it a different destination – after all, redundancy is always a good thing when it comes to backup, and Backup4all Professional provides plenty of destination options.

While it’s important to back up all of your working files, blindly backing up “everything” can lead to longer backup times and a waste of space on the destination drive. Each backup has a source folder, but that folder may still contain plenty of data which you don’t want backed up (or at least not on that particular job or to that destination). Backup4all’s powerful filtering interface lets you select exactly what files to exclude from your backup, based on numerous parameters:

When you create a new job, the filters are already populated with sensible defaults (such as “don’t back up the pagefile”). You can always modify those, or add new ones.

Backup4all Professional also supports multiple modes of backup: Full, differential, incremental, and mirror backup (which is basically folder synchronization). Another important feature is its ability to back up locked files without closing them first: This means if you use Microsoft Outlook, you can have your mailbox backed up without having to exit Outlook first.

As you may expect, you can also compress the resulting backup into multiple formats, and encrypt it with several different encryption standards:

All in all, Backup4all Professional is a very powerful personal backup solution. While it does help you get started with its Wizard interface, its real power lies in the detailed Backup Properties dialog. If you’ve ever used a backup application before, you would be familiar with most of the terminology. If you haven’t, you would do well to take a few moments and figure out the various options – you will thank yourself when the time comes.

Get Backup4all Professional for just $49.95 from their online store or you can try your luck in our giveaway.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

Step 1: Fill in the giveaway form

Please fill in the form with your real name and email address so that we can get in touch if you are chosen as a winner. Click here if you can’t view the form.

The giveaway code required to activate the form is available from Friday’s newsletter or on our Facebook page.

Step 2: Share!

You’re almost done. Now, all that’s left to do is to share the post. There are 2 options to choose from or you can do both!

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, July 22nd at 2100hrs PDT. The winners will be selected at random and informed via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank Softland for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

[update] And the winners are…

1. Graham Warner
2. Nick Brice
3. kARL sCHWENDENMAN
4. Chris Washburn
5. Janet
6. Texas Gail Raymond
7. SCOTT BLATTMAN
8. Elmar
9. Scott Huish
10. priyank vijaywargi
11. idris kurtum
12. Kelly Gafford
13. Bart Aronoff
14. Roger Caldwell
15. Sebastian Valero
16. kwye
17. Mihai Olteanu
18. joshua
19. Ken Fulton
20. Robert Phillips
21. Richard Basham
22. fk
23. Ispas Ion
24. Brian Alberghini
25. Izieh Baral

Congratulations! Your licenses have been sent via email. Enjoy!