Saturday, September 02, 2006
Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore Utilities
Back4Win
Back4Win allows home users the ability to backup and restore your data to ZIP and self-extracting EXE files. You can control the level of compression of your data files, span disks, predefine the disk size (to suit CD-Rs and CD-RWs), password-lock your backups, burn to CD-R/W, restore from damaged backups, etc.
Cobian Backup
Cobian Backup is a backup and restore utility that can backup your files and directories to another directory or drive on the same computer or to another computer on your network. It also supports FTP backup. You can compress and encrypt your backups. Standalone decompression and decryption utilities are also available so that if you wish, you can recover your files without having to use the backup program. Included with the backup program is a scheduler, so that you can schedule your backups to occur, say, every night when you are not using the computer. The program also supports remote backups. This is a Windows program.
FreeByte Backup
Freebyte Backup is a Windows program that supports the backing up files and directories to a backup directory. It also handles incremental backups, where only files not already in the backup set is saved, scheduled backups and profiles.
Unison File Synchronizer
Unison synchronizes files and directories stored on different hosts on the Internet. It can handle changes made to either replica of a distributed directory structure, and hence is more than just a mirroring utility. It is open source, distributed under the GNU GPL, and works on Windows, Linux, Solaris, OS X, etc.
SyncBack
SyncBack backs up and synchronises your files and directories to either the same drive, a different drive, a different medium (CDRW, CompactFlash, etc), an FTP server, a network, etc. It supports file filters (for example, to back up only specific types of files, say, *.doc), folders, copy verification (to check the integrity of your backups), background backups (with auto-close of programs that are running, to ensure data integrity), log files of your backups (in HTML format), etc. It works with the Windows scheduler so that you can schedule your backups. Backups can be compressed.