GFI Backup Is An Easy To Use, Free Backup Solution

Another program very good at Syncing (I know, I've tried about all of them) is Super Flexible File Synchronizer. I actually sync 100+GB daily over DSL connecting to my SFTP server. Not many file sync utils have SFTP capability. Another very good sync program is Goodsync. Both cost money however.

rejester

@saintseminole: Are you sure you had the Cobian settings right?

I use Cobian; I have it set up to backup every day with 6 incremental backups between each full backup (i.e. full backup once a week). It works just fine. You can even tell Cobian how many full backups to keep, and it will automatically purge older backups.

GFI Backup is the new free successor to Titan Backup, which was my pick for favorite shareware backup utility in post #40 of my utilities blog (way back in October 2007). Check that post for my reviews of Titan, Cobian, SyncBack, and several other backup programs. (And see the preceding post, #39, for some background and explanation of what to look for in backup software.) I hope this is helpful.

@piesforyou: In XP or Windows 2003 you can right-click on My Computer, go to Manage, then Disk Management. You should see your removable drive in there. Right-click on it and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths" and pick whatever drive you wanted.

I don't know where this is in Vista or Windows 7, but I imagine it's pretty similar.

I had to learn this trick a few years ago when my Windows XP machine at work would always stick removable drives into the K: drive, which was already mapped as a network drive. No idea why it kept insisting to map the USB sticks to K: since it was already taken. It would never move to L: on its own, I always had to force it.

merkuri

does GFI stand for good f-ing idea?

Has anyone compared this to SyncBack yet? I've been using SyncBack and am quite pleased with it.

I tried Cobian first, but Cobian would do a *full* backup every time, and never incremental, no matter how many times I checked that setting...

@[support.microsoft.com]

Liam Hanks

Is there a way I can assign a specific drive letter to my removable drive, so that it always gets assigned the same drive letter no matter how many other devices are plugged in at the time?

piesforyou

Versionbackup is still my fave.

piesforyou

@strabes: You don't even have to click through to read the features page because in the blurb above it says, "...it can backup your data to local folders, FTP, network, or even removable flash drives..."

mahumphrey

@TheFu: You are thinking of delta which stands for differences. The delta method only backups up the differences or changes in a file. This might also be called a block level differential/incremental.

On the other hand, a traditional incremental backup requires a full backup first, then each successive backup is only the changes (file level, not block level) from the previous one. This means that you could, in practice, need your latest backup and every previous backup to restore.

A traditional differential backup requires a full backup first, then each successive backup is only the changes (again, file level, not block level) compared to the last full backup. This means that you would need only a full backup and the latest differential to restore.

You probably knew most of that, but I get carried away.

mahumphrey

+1 Only used this for a little bit to do some simple backups of my media files, and it's extremely fast and user-friendly! I like it a lot. Well done.

Interesting, but their definition of "differential" is different from the other tools I've seen. They always copy any new file, not just the parts that changed at the block level.

The shadow copy part is interesting too. nice.

Still using completely open source and free without registration `rdiff-backup` here.

TheFu

Looking at the screenshots on their website, it looks simple, yet feature rich, and easy to use.

Will be giving this a try

I like the look of the option to have stacked backups, and only keep the last x amount of versions. This way my backup area doesn't fill with old backups

mejobloggs

@SalParadise:
you should be able as long as you schedule a back up job for the registry often

stkbgr20041

I've been using this program since it came out in May.
I found an article on Crave a CNet Blog:
[tinyurl.com]

stkbgr20041

Hmmm... the link says the program can be used to back up the registry. I discovered the hard way that the standard XP backup program stores all of its settings in the registry, which means, when your registry is hosed, you cannot use the XP backup program to restore it.

Does anyone know if this program suffers from the same short-sighted design?

SalParadise

I feel like this is deja vu. Didn't lh recently do a review of GFI? Or am I just losing it?

In any case I use it religiously for backing up to my external. I'm just waiting for a bigger HDD for my server to test FTP support. :)

Nano-Byte

The post says it can backup your data to network (among other places) but Time Capsule is not specified. I'd suspect that if Time Capsule is reachable from a vanilla Windows install, then it SHOULD be available, but I don't have one, so I can't test.

I just installed it, and it does look pretty slick. I've been using GoodSync for a while. I'm interested to see how this one works....

Does anyone know if this works with a Time Capsule or other network drive?