Best Free Backup Program

Locating a decent free backup program can be a pretty depressing experience. It's hard to find decent commercial backup program let alone a free one. Most products have glaring deficiencies, the most common being difficulty of use and lack of CD/DVD support.

Difficulty of use is the real deal-breaker for me. If a product doesn't allow an average user to easily set up an effective backup then as far as I'm concerned it's pretty well useless.

Let me explain why by example. Most users want to backup their email but have no idea where on their computer their email is stored. Good backup programs provide check boxes for "back up my Outlook mail" and similar options for other popular email clients. The same comment applies to backing up Favorites or the Windows Registry. Again, most users simply don't know where these files are located. Well designed backup programs understand this and make it easy by providing check boxes.

But most backup programs are not well designed. They require the user to specify the exact location of files to be backed up and most users don't know where they are located. It's just dumb.

Of the 14 free products I looked at I've only found one program that I feel happy to recommend to average users. It's actually an older version of a current commercial product. The vendor is offering the older version for free with the hope users might later upgrade to the newest version. However, the old program is good enough that most users probably won't need to.

The program is WinBackup V1.86 from Uniblue Systems [1] . It's a pretty good backup program by any standards: it's got a Wizard to help users setup their backups and another to initiate a recovery. It has handy check boxes for commonly backed up items and a lot of flexibility for adding specific data sets to those standard items. It can back up to any drive recognized by Windows including network drives. Most importantly it will backup to CD/DVD without the need for third party packet driver software. It supports compression and encryption and provides backup data validation as well. It has a built in scheduler that runs backups automatically. The feature list goes on and on.

"Well," you may ask, "what's wrong with it?"

A few things. First, it backs up in a proprietary format which means you can't read the data without having a copy of WinBackup on hand. This won't worry many users but I find it an annoyance.

Second, it had trouble reading deeply nested directory structures. Worse still, it reacts to the problem by just hanging which necessitates a system reboot. Many users just won't have data nested so deep as to cause a problem but be aware it can happen.

Third, it occasionally missed a scheduled backup and worse still didn't warn me. I'm still not sure why. Indeed, it may be a problem specific to my setup. But again, be aware of the potential.

These reservations aside, WinBackup V1.86 gets my top recommendation as the best free data backup program available. It's not up to the standard of the best commercial products but will still meet the needs of many average users.

If you want an alternative there's Cobian Backup [2]. It's been around for quite a while and while basic is totally reliable. When I say basic I mean it - there's not even a restore feature. However it's used by thousand of organizations and individual users and has a strong following. There's a Unicode version that only works with Windows NT and later and a second version that doesn't support Unicode but works with all Windows versions.

Code:
[1] http://www.backupanswers.com/freewinbackup/ Freeware, Windows 98 and later, 4.2MB
[2] http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm Freeware, Windows NT and later, 7.9MB