Best free backup software
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I know I'll probably get flamed for this - but I've found the built-in NTBACKUP utility works just fine. Backs up anything important and recovery always works. What more do you need? -CB :D
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The backup utility included with XP is good, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308422. Also, free online backups are available from BT digital vault, http://bt.com/digitalvault/ (1GB free) and http://www.mozy.com/ (MozyHome Free - 2GB free). Amazon S3 isn't free but very cheap, http://www.amazon.com/s3/. You can use http://www.jungledisk.com/ which is free, to perform your online backup to your s3 space. I like online backup. Remarkably, I'm not backing anything up at present. I suppose I should address this anomaly, I've heard that hard drives can fail.:~
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Amazingly yes they do ;P , and even more than one at the same time can do so (that's why I'm here). It's really crappy when you lose the phone numbers for all your college buddies that are scattered here and there. I found mozy yesterday and I'm taking that for a spin as well as Cobian.
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Depending upon just how much you wish to backup, many data compression utilites can simply be set to add/update mode. Some, like 7Zip, are free. Hybridize the command-line file with an appropriate call your compression application and you've got an easy backup system. One advantage: if you use a common compression format, you don't need any special tools to restore your files in that time-of-need. [Modification] Here's a sample command line -
7z u archive.zip *.docupdates *.doc files to archive archive.zip."The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"How do you find out if you're unwanted if everyone you try to ask tells you to go away?" - Balboos HaGadolmodified on Thursday, February 14, 2008 9:39 AM
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Paying for Acronis Trueimage[^]. It works. Well.
Visit http://www.notreadytogiveup.com/[^] and do something special today.
I agree. We use it at my work, it is very very easy to use and works (I've had to restore from a backup several times and no problems). We've tried scheduling backup tasks to run automatically and save to a network share, that has been hit and miss (we have an older version though so it could have been worked out), but a local backup drive has been no problem.
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Hopefully a Windows developer takes inspiration from Time Machine on Mac OS X and builds a Windows clone. It really is the best backup software I have ever used. The best bit about it is I rarely knowingly use it. It just sits in the background backing up and never interferes. I reckon a Windows developer would make some good money building a Time Machine clone.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
I think Windows Home server probably meets your description. With it you can have up to 10 home computers backed up to daily, weekly, and monthly restore points, all done automatically. Also, the claim is complete restoration of the entire system effortlessly upon a system failure that requires rebuilding the machine. I own it and so far haven't had to use that feature but have used the restore-a-file feature several times - it's like being at work but not just having backups available for server stored files - you always know you have a backup up of any file on any machine you have in the house. It acts as a NAS, has IIS 6 running on it too for your web serving pleasure. This part allows retrieving or storing a file on the server from anwhere you have internet access. Ok, I didn't mean for this to sound like an advertisement, just sharing this info as I think for developers with a multi-PC household, you could find this useful. I felt that my developer system - a 2003 Dell that is loaded to the hilt with IDE's and numerous other software development tools would be a real loss if any of the hard drives crapped out. Kent
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I think Windows Home server probably meets your description. With it you can have up to 10 home computers backed up to daily, weekly, and monthly restore points, all done automatically. Also, the claim is complete restoration of the entire system effortlessly upon a system failure that requires rebuilding the machine. I own it and so far haven't had to use that feature but have used the restore-a-file feature several times - it's like being at work but not just having backups available for server stored files - you always know you have a backup up of any file on any machine you have in the house. It acts as a NAS, has IIS 6 running on it too for your web serving pleasure. This part allows retrieving or storing a file on the server from anwhere you have internet access. Ok, I didn't mean for this to sound like an advertisement, just sharing this info as I think for developers with a multi-PC household, you could find this useful. I felt that my developer system - a 2003 Dell that is loaded to the hilt with IDE's and numerous other software development tools would be a real loss if any of the hard drives crapped out. Kent
I haven't used Windows Home Server. It does look good but it is also a hardware solution where Time Machine is a software solution and works with either your internal HDs or external HDs (or with a bit of tweaking, with your network drives as I have it.) Nice to have Windows Home Server but it would also be nice if the software bit could be loaded onto existing Windows machines and let them use existing NAS or external HDs.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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I haven't used Windows Home Server. It does look good but it is also a hardware solution where Time Machine is a software solution and works with either your internal HDs or external HDs (or with a bit of tweaking, with your network drives as I have it.) Nice to have Windows Home Server but it would also be nice if the software bit could be loaded onto existing Windows machines and let them use existing NAS or external HDs.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
Yes, it is a hardware + software solution. The nice thing is that you can repurpose an older PC sitting around though as it doesn't require much horsepower to do it's job. No monitor is needed, just the box once you have it set up. The server software is based on MS's small business server so it's windows server 2003-like. You can RDC to it and install software and use it like you might any PC except that you have a slight risk of bogging it down then with additional processes and you could otherwise affect the normal operation of it I guess to. Oh, and for those interested, the OEM system builder version is about $175. Kent
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Yes, it is a hardware + software solution. The nice thing is that you can repurpose an older PC sitting around though as it doesn't require much horsepower to do it's job. No monitor is needed, just the box once you have it set up. The server software is based on MS's small business server so it's windows server 2003-like. You can RDC to it and install software and use it like you might any PC except that you have a slight risk of bogging it down then with additional processes and you could otherwise affect the normal operation of it I guess to. Oh, and for those interested, the OEM system builder version is about $175. Kent
Can I install it as an application on my existing Windows XP OS? I'd be interested to try it but not willing to use a whole box/vm for a server OS.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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Can I install it as an application on my existing Windows XP OS? I'd be interested to try it but not willing to use a whole box/vm for a server OS.
regards, Paul Watson Ireland & South Africa
Fernando A. Gomez F. wrote:
At least he achieved immortality for a few years.
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if you want to stick with free backups then i would recommend to additionally use a free online backup service like mozy (2 GB free) https://mozy.com/[^] :-D
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If you want a simple backup, I don't have a recommendation. If you want enterprise scale server/client backup for Windows/*nix clients, BACULA. I had it set up in a few hours and it backs up all my servers wonderfully. I'm going to start using it for clients (Documents and Settings folders) too. You can backup to any media including a hard drive. I have it doing full/diff/incr and I can to point-in-time restores. It is very comperable to the expensive Legato Networker. It's roots are *nix but there is a windows version. Google: bacula
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If the *copy route, then RoboCopy: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displaylang=en[^] Part of Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools but robocopy works on any Windows. (My first post; that link better look right)
I've been using TeraCopy and I highly recommend it
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It may not be free, but I've recently heard a few good things about Carbonite for online data storage. $50/year seems to be a decent price too since it provides the off-site storage automatically. I'm neww to the backup arena, so I'm not really sure what else is out there, but it may be worth a look... http://www.carbonite.com
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, burger in one hand, drink in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO......What a ride!"
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It may not be free, but I've recently heard a few good things about Carbonite for online data storage. $50/year seems to be a decent price too since it provides the off-site storage automatically. I'm neww to the backup arena, so I'm not really sure what else is out there, but it may be worth a look... http://www.carbonite.com
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, burger in one hand, drink in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO......What a ride!"
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Wow, thanks! That looks like it might work very nicely, provided the service is decent. I will certainly test it out.
As I said, I only recently heard about but what I've heard have been good things. I haven't used it or any other online backup service. If you do choose to try it, please share your experience over the boards. I need to start backing up my stuff soon as well, but have yet to decide which approach to take. Currently, I use a batch file that runs twice a day copying to an external hard drive. While this works great, it won't survive fire or theft. Offsite storage is really the only way to protect against a data disaster. Thanks, Mike
Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, burger in one hand, drink in the other, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WOO HOO......What a ride!"
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I agree. We use it at my work, it is very very easy to use and works (I've had to restore from a backup several times and no problems). We've tried scheduling backup tasks to run automatically and save to a network share, that has been hit and miss (we have an older version though so it could have been worked out), but a local backup drive has been no problem.
deltalmg wrote:
We've tried scheduling backup tasks to run automatically and save to a network share, that has been hit and miss
Funny thing, of all the free backup software I've tried, the scheduling function never works. It's some kind of a conspiracy!
A treat for all down voters...[^] "you can't forget something you never knew..." M. Du Toit
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deltalmg wrote:
We've tried scheduling backup tasks to run automatically and save to a network share, that has been hit and miss
Funny thing, of all the free backup software I've tried, the scheduling function never works. It's some kind of a conspiracy!
A treat for all down voters...[^] "you can't forget something you never knew..." M. Du Toit
That's the thing though. Acronis isn't free. Much better than Ghost though, we've used both. We have medical devices configured with dual harddrives and nightly backup the primary hard drive to the secondary. We've had to "roll back" before when we had problems. ~20GB on the drive we were able to be up and running in ~20 min. The scheduling to backup across the network to a shared drive might be an issue if connectivity was intermittent not sure (was running after hours). Anyways a second HDD is "good enough". If things blew up and we had to replace the machine the vendor would have to do it anyways due to FDA constraints. This is just nice to have if we have a patch pushed that screws things up, we roll back to the previous day.
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You can try one that I wrote: filebackup.sourceforge.net It is written in C# using .NET 2.0 and the source is available and it's FREE. I am sure it would not be considered the best, but it is very easy to use and it does scheduled backups (which have never failed in my tests). It uses the date change on a file as criteria for backup. As with all software I am sure it could use some improvements. A few limitations: 1. It doesn't remove directories from the backup destination area that are no longer present in the backup source area. 2. It doesn't do compression. 3. It doesn't do incremental backups. 4. If you select a subset of directories in a parent directory (i.e., not all child directories are selected) and then subsequently add a directory to the parent directory, FileBackup currently has no way of knowing that the new directory has been added and therefore will not back it up. A point to keep in mind: The fact that a person would select a sub-set of directories implies that they may not want a newly added directory to be backed up anyway. So, whether this should be automated or not comes into question. Just being aware of this point will ensure that you modify your backup profile as required. 5. It will not backup files that are "locked" by an application. As well, it will not backup things like the registry. This could be handled by taking advantage of the Volume Shadow Copy mechanism that Windows XP can make use of. If these limitations are not a worry to you or if you have some coding skills in C# you can make it do whatever you would like it to do.
modified on Monday, February 18, 2008 1:50 PM