Yesterday I tried to open my fiancial file and couldn’t; it looked like the file was corrupted. I thought I was going to throw up. I am the sort of person that never uses cash and painstakingly enters every penny I spend so I can track my spending habbits and monitor my budget. It took me a long time to get my financial program setup so my buget and bills perfectly reflected my life, not to mention I recently started doing Nikki’s bills also.

Thankfully it turned out to be user error, the financial file was fine and no data was lost. The experience was not without a purpose though, I finally got off my butt and started looking around for a decent scheduled backup program. Being a software engineer I understand the importance of keeping backups of anything critical. Despite that I never do a good job of making backups at regular intervals. Instead I make a backup here and there every 6 months when I have some free time.

Not anymore. After only about 5 minutes of searching on the net I came across a freeware automated backup program called SyncBack. This program is great. About 15 minutes after downloading it I had it configured to weekly backup my entire website from a mapped network drive to a removeable USB drive. Once it is done it sends me an email with the details of the backup. 

I am impressed with the rediculous configurability of this software. For example, on my website I create a lot of smaller versions of full size photos. I dont want to back up these smaller versions since I can always regenerate later. WIth SyncBack I have set a rule to ignore directories matching the names I use for the small versions. I also have it set to filter out temporary web files that would otherwise waste space on my backup drive. That feature alone makes this program worth looking at. Additionally this thing can backup files from mapped network drives, not just physical drives, as well as FTP directories. The program integrates with windows scheduler so I runs automatically rather than me having to remember to run a button.

This program took about 15 to get up and running but if I ever loose my website (again) it will save my 10 times amount by giving me a recent backup to restore to.

I highly recommend looking into Syncback if you are thinking about backup software. 

Check out some screenshots