Quick and dirty backup

If there's one thing computer users need to deal with that they typically don't, it's the dreaded backup task. I can count the number of people I know who regularly back up their important files on two hands, and I'm sure it's only that many because I teach a workshop that includes constant mention of doing your backups.

There essentially two kinds of backups. One can be quite time consuming and can be forgiven because it's not the end of the world and the other is fast and painless and is probably the most important type of backup you can do.

The former that I'm referring to is the full backup. It copies everything on your computer using special software and does so in a manner that requires that specific software to get any of the backed up files back. The software typically costs money (although free full backup software is available - Clonezilla is one example) and the process takes a while (an hour or more in some cases). But a full backup of your system, while a good idea, is not absolutely necessary only because as long as you still have all of your source software install discs (and downloads), you can always re-install your software.

The latter type is much more important because it deals with the files that can't be replaced. Your documents, photos, music, video clips, movies, etc. These are the files that need to be backed up the most, and incidentally are the easiest to copy. Especially thanks to my absolute favourite Microsoft toy - Sync Toy.

Sync Toy this is a free synchronization utility from Microsoft (Windows Genuine Advantage required). It works on XP - SP2 and newer, plus Vista and Windows 7. The program can copy, move, rename, and delete files between any number of folders and computers. The concept is that you define folder pairs.

On my computer for example, all of my irreplaceable files are contained within the My Documents folder. So what I've done is create a My Documents folder on one of my external hard drives and created a folder pair in Sync Toy that 'echoes' all of my computer files in that folder onto the external hard drive folder of the same name. Once every couple of weeks, I simply open Sync Toy and run that folder pair task, which checks to see what's new, updated, moved or deleted on my computer and mirrors the same thing onto my external drive. Since there's no special compression or anything going on, if I accidentally delete something on my computer, I can always get it back from my external drive (until the next sync). If I don't want any echoed files to be deleted at all, I just choose the Contibute action, which keeps copying new or updated files over, but never deletes anything. Naturally, running the sync on the folder pair will take a while the first time (to copy everything over), but after that, the sync takes a few seconds, because only what's changed gets copied over.

So in a nutshell, backup doesn't have to be painful, nor take a long time (after the first run). You just need the free Sync Toy program and an external hard drive and you're good to go. Organize your files in a manner that they can be paired to a folder(s) on the external drive and run the Sync Toy on them.

SyncToy requires the .NET framework.