Best free backup software
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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