softwarethatdoesntsuck.com

I don't know about you but I've been searching for a good backup solution for the typical desktop / home office user. Everyone needs a backup. It has to be simple, automatic, it has to stay out of your way, and it has to work. Lets assume this environment: A) You want to backup to an external hard drive or network attached storage device. If its a NAS device then you really want to use UNC paths like \\mydevice\myfolder instead of mapping it as a drive to your computer and running special software to map the drive or having windows pop up an annoying message every time you take your laptop on the road and it can't find the drive. B) It has to be automatic, so it needs to have an easy to use scheduler and something that you can just check once in a while to make sure your backup ran. A good backup runs when you aren't around and it never bothers you. It's just there when you need it. C) Your backup needs to be fast enough that it can backup all your data in the time your not using your computer. Offsite backups like Carbonite are good but they can't be your main backup because if you have hundreds of gigs of data then it can take a couple of months to backup everything. D) Reliable!!! Who wants to spend time troubleshooting their backup software? You'd think that would be obvious but I've tried all the top rated backup software according to PCWorld magazine, and I've tried them on several computers running several different versions of Windows. I backup to a network attached storage (NAS) device, and I have a few of those I've tried. Right now I'm using the Western Digital MyBookWorld with 500 MB capacity. It runs a little on the slow side but it was a really good deal! Anyway, NovaStor's NovaBackup didn't work well, I even tried the new 8.0 version. NovaStor's website (novastor.com) does a very poor job of helping you get good information on the different versions of the product. I'd run it the first time, and after 12 hours it finished my backup but then I found in the logs later that there were some errors, even though the software claims to support backing up of open files, and I also found out my regularly scheduled backups weren't completing properly. EMC Retrospect 7.5 didn't get anywhere with me. I couldn't get it working with NAS devices. Talk about suckware! What world are they living in? Who's buying tape backup drives? Another problem with backups is most backup programs store your backups in a proprietary format. Now if you ever want to recover your data you'll need a licensed version of their software that can read that data file for you. HOSTAGE!! My recommendation: GoodSync. Here's why I like it: ITS EASY. IT WORKS. You tell it what folders to backup. You can backup everything, or exclude some folders. You can tell it just to sync My Documents if you want. It has a screen split down the middle from the top down. You tell it a folder on the left, and you tell it a folder on the right. Press analyze, and it figures out what is different between the two folders and sub-folders. Press GO and it synchronizes them. For backing up, you can tell GoodSync that My Documents is the master copy, and then set a destination folder to live on your NAS device or external HD or USB thumbdrive or whatever. Tell it to analyze and sync, and it will make sure your destination folder is an exact copy of your source folder. The first time this runs its slow because it backups up everything. However, next time you run it the tool will only copy the files that have changed, so your incremental backups are very fast. If you run the tool once a week it will keep your data current probably in under a half hour. If a file is locked and can't be copied, it will get updated in the next sync. SIMPLE! You can try it free for 30 days, after that its under $20 USD. Get it here: GoodSync synchronization software for Windows