Best free backup software
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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