Wednesday, April 02, 2008

backup your computer data

undoubtedly, we all have important data residing on our computers. That may include emails, important documents , financial sheets, digital photos, database files etc..

data can get lost: your hard disk can break down, a virus can wipe out your files, your laptop can be stolen, let alone fire, water floods etc

having said that, backup strategy is your insurance against a tragedy.

Human tend to fall in to the following categories backup - wise

1- Do not understand the need for backup
2- Understand the need for backup, but always look at the bright side and as such can dispel any backup related obsessions or flashes
3- Understand the need but either lazy or incapable of performing it
4- Understand the need, and are taking it religiously

Well, one day a disaster will take place and you will loose what can be indispensable data. Taking regular backup can be a daunting and not to mention a very boring process. I searched the internet and found some user friendly tools that should prove very helpful in assisting you to create an effective backup strategy. Most of these tools can allow you to take incremental backup. An incremental backup only take the changes between your last backup and the current one , thus making your backup much faster

Anyway, i will name a few products, and you can search the net and by using the following search words for more tools

file duplicator, File synchronize, File mirror, Mirror Disk

you will find tools that are prices from a few bucks to several hundreds.

I tried the following two products

ViseVersa http://www.tgrmn.com
Titan Backup http://www.neobytesolutions.com/

You should not know have an excuse for loosing data. Please remeber that it is not enough to take your backup to a different hard disk within your computer, it should be taken to an external device and stored in a safe place

Happy backing-up (or backup-ing)
Ammar sajdi

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Review Criteria

Before we started reviewing backup software, we identified a list of essential features for any quality backup program:

* Easy for average users to install
* Easy to use wizard for creating backups
* Easy to use wizard for restoring backups
* Supports both full and incremental backups
* Can create backups in excess of 4GB and 65,525 files
* Can create backup data sets that span different drives and folders
* Can backup from and to and from any standard Windows drive
* Can create scheduled, unattended backups
* Can compress backup data
* Can explicitly backup email files for major email clients
* Can explicitly backup Favorites and Desktop
* Provides backup data verification
* Can record multiple time stamped backup sets in one folder
* Backups can be encrypted or password protected
* Backs up new sub folders added since backup set defined
* User accessible log file
* Write to a wide range of CD/DVDs drives without the use of third party software
* Can create multi-volume backup sets (e.g. backup over several CDs)
* Warns conspicuously if a a scheduled backup fails
* Can restore individual files from a backup set
* Can restore to a different drive or folder
* Email support by vendor

To this list of essential features we added these desirable features

* Backs up quickly
* Supports differential backups
* provides pre and post backup processing
* Offers robust encryption
* Can backup in non proprietary format
* Provides simulated runs
* Offers more than one level of compression
* Can restore individual files from a multi-volume backup set
* Can backup to a remote FTP server
* Can explicitly backup Windows Registry
* Can explicitly backup Windows Drivers
* Can format and erase rewritable CDs and DVDs
* Can backup exclusively opened file such as Outlook
* Email or SMS notification of failed backup
* Phone support by vendor

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