The storage of precious photographs, college papers, work documents, and archived music of old records filled your computer’s hard drive in 2007. Don’t lose it all when your hard drive suddenly crashes and you are greeted with the Blue Screen of Death! This new year 2008, schedule your PC to automatically run a backup of your files onto an external hard drive, a network computer, or your own web server using free software, SyncBack Freeware.

It is inevitable; hard drives will fail. However, when it happens, be ready with a backup to restore that final thesis paper or the pictures of the little baby before the grandmother attempts to frequent them.
Simply attempting to remember to manually burn files onto CD’s & DVD’s can be risky and tedious, not to mention that a scratch on a CD or DVD can render some files corrupted. Automate the process to run nightly & monthly backups locally or elsewhere.

You will need an external hard drive (preferred) or another computer that can hold about 4 times the amount of data you want to backup. External hard drives have dropped in price over the last few months like here and here. USB 2.0 or Firewire connections will be fine as long as your computer supports it.

Download and Install

Download and install SyncBack Freeware v3.2.14. A $25 version is available, but I haven’t found any limitations in my normal use to warrant my money being spent on this. Plug in the external drive and browse to in Explorer (you might want to label or rename the drive, "Backup"). Create 2 folders, like I have, named "Nightly" & "Monthly" (feel free to add a "Weekly" if you want to run a weekly backup).

Create the Backup Profiles

Launching SyncBack and create a new Backup profile called "Nightly Backup". Set your source directory or what folder you want to backup and set your destination directory, the "Nightly" folder we just created on the external drive.

A neat feature allows you to go through and select exactly which subdirectories you would like to backup and which ones to ignore. This is helpful if you chose "My Documents" or some other huge folder that contain folders such as "My Music" which are fairly static. You might want to un-check the "My Music" folder for the Nightly backups and only back it up during the Monthly backup or a Weekly one if you decide to do so.

Schedule the Backup

Lastly, Schedule the "Nightly Backup" profile as a job / task in Windows as a nightly task. I set mine to run at 3:00AM every night. ** Set your Windows password for the scheduled task by pressing the "Set Password" button or else it will fail to run. **

Do the same for your "Monthly Backup" and "Weekly Backup" if you so choose. I split my profiles up into exactly what was being backed up which can also be done by consolidating them into one profile and choosing those subdirectories.

SyncBack Features

SyncBack can be set to send an email notification of all backup information or just upon failures.

A great thing about SyncBack is that all files are by default not compressed into some proprietary format, but are simply copied verbatim, structure and all, to the specified location. If you
accidentally deleted a file, now you can check in your nightly, weekly, or monthly backup by browsing to the exact location on the external drive.

After your first run, SyncBack will speed through your backups telling if a file has been modified and backing it up if it has or running whatever advanced options that you chose, like Synchronize.

SyncBack is really simple, easy, and reliable without getting into any nitty gritty command line backups with rsync.

What do you think of SyncBack? What program do you currently use to backup or have you been putting it off hoping that it wouldn’t happen to you? Let’s hear it in the comments.

I first found out about SyncBack from the wonderful site Lifehacker here.

Why don’t you use Windows Backup?
Until I found SyncBack, I had been looking everywhere for a good backup program and never found one that really did what I wanted. I wanted to choose exactly what to backup and be able to easily restore it all or just one file. When I installed Windows Vista, I thought there would be new hope. No, it was too fruity. A user can only choose which drives backup and what TYPES of files to backup. TYPES!!! I don’t want to backup by types, but by choosing all directories and all their files, which might possibly
include files not of the TYPE.