Automatic backups

When you use the computer to create important data, you should create another copy of that data, a process known as backup, and store that copy (backup) on the same machine, a different physical harddrive on the same machine, or on a harddrive on another machine. The best kind of a backup plan is to have the copy stored offsite. Offsite means the backup is on a computer that is physically nowhere near the computer that has the primary data.

Most of the time, the backup process is so laborious that we human beings "forget" to do it. This is where automatic backup programs can help us in this repetitive, tedious, and at times quite complicated task. Basically an automatic backup program at a predetermined interval of time makes a copy of a certain piece of data (usually a folder with files) to another location that is either local or over the network.

I have been using one such program for a few years now and am very happy with it. It's called SecondCopy2000 from http://www.centered.com. The latest version is version 7. The only major difference that I am able to tell between version 2000 and 7 is the ability of version 7 to backup to and download files from FTP servers both local and over the Internet. Both versions offer compression and incremental backup. Incremental backup is the act of copying only files that have been modified since the previous backup. This greatly reduces the duplication of the copying and save time and network bandwidth.

I will take a test drive version 7 and will give you my opinion of it in Part 2 of this post.