The author of this article has no connections with any of the companies mentioned in the article.

To do or not to do - backup

Computer users are clearly divided into two groups:

• User who lost precious data once and now paranoically backup his data.
• User who does not know that he will be in the first group above.

If you are working on anything that has value for you or your company you should think about backup. This text will help people a bit to find the right solution for their backup problems. But first, just one comment more:

Two real cases

A lot of "terrible" stories exist about backups. Some of them are mine. For months I was preparing an index of my CDROM which was supposed to contain hundreds of useful programs. Every program was shortly but clearly documented with the list of possibilities and bugs found. Originally on my computer every program had to be installed, checked, documented, and finally usually deleted to make room for other programs. But the program index was containing every important detail about every program on CDROM. Guess what - that index was gone. Once in a hurry, I accidentally deleted it and had not the recovery program available on computer. Now I am making my index again. Don't tell me anything, I know...

In the second case, there had been a nice database once. A manufacturer of the database had implemented single administrative command with a lot of options. Every option had one letter, for example -l, or -i, or -a. Every one of these letters are doing some relatively innocent thing, except one very special letter that does guess what - delete the whole database! Can you figure out for yourself what happened? Yeah, but I had the backup this time. Ha!

Basic rule

The primary rule is simple: whenever you do some important job or part of an important job on your computer - do the backup.

Of course, everybody knows that, but the knowledge is no issue here. The problem is nobody does that - until he finds himself in the group number one described above.

OK, OK, but what program should one use?

This is the central theme of this text.

You can buy an expensive backup package, full of impressive options and from reputable company. But for most users that would be a big overhead. That is because there are much cheaper shareware programs that could do the backup just fine without the burden to learn sophisticated options.

But on the other look, when you turn to shareware programs, you would find about several hundreds of those! Which one should you choose?

What is the must for a PC shareware backup program?

In my opinion that is as follows:

• Backup should be compressed: Obviously, why not? You surely need to spare the media space.
• Non-proprietary backup format: some of shareware programs are imitating the expensive backup packages by making a special format of backup that can be read only by that program alone. They are trying to play like Mr. Bill Gates does - make their own formats and protocols, their own network and computer, their special explorer and make good money by selling their own special software and hardware which are the only means of accessing that data. Don't even look at such programs! Because you deserve something better. Especially nowadays when much better technical solutions are available. Those are some much more universally accepted backup formats which has compression in them and that the far majority of people can use. My choice is: zip format compatible with Pkzip program, almost universally known and used. You can easily read it and you don't need the original backup program for extracting the files from it. You also can give it to the others without distributing the backup program that made it.
• Backup of individual files and directories: In practice you always want to choose a particular file for backup. Or a particular directory with all files inside. A very nice feature would be the individual control of having the backup include both files and directories at some point in file hierarchy, or include files only. That means the complete control over what goes to backup.
• Command-line options: When you decide what files you want for backup, you should have the easy way to start your backup whenever you want. I call this manual-backup. Some shareware programs have so called scheduled backup, one that runs at predefined times regularly. That is the nice feature for sure. But when user knows his computer better then only playing games on it, he wants to make his own backup when he is willing to, and not on predefined times. The easiest way to do so is to call the backup program with appropriate command-line options by clicking some icon perhaps, and it should start the backup program, do the backup of predefined list of files, and finish silently. Clean and sure thing, because you know exactly when and why you do your backup.

What shareware program to choose for backup?

If you think that among several hundreds of shareware programs you can choose almost everyone and it covers the basic functions above - you are so much wrong.

It is not just the basic functions that those programs don't follow. Anyway, the basic functions above are only my personal opinion and perhaps someone does not agree on them. But it is interesting that I found that those shareware programs not only does not follow my basic rules, they often does not even work stable in numerous cases; one or two of them ruined my computer when tried them, and some crashed on very basic operations. They have often some complicated schemes and even some funny terminology that you have to learn just to backup some files!

Just when I thought I found a descent backup program, it shows that it has a bug, or is not stable, or whatever... At last, I found some solution for backup. But first see what I found after tedious downloading, installing and checking dozens of backup programs.

Investigation

Here are about half of the backup programs that I checked. Some of them are very bed, some of them have a lot of advanced features. ALL THESE PROGRAMS BUT THE LAST ONE (Backup2000) SHOULD NOT BE USED IN MY OPPINION. My intention is not to list all their possibilities or all their bed sides, I am simply telling some of my observations.

• DataArmour 1.3.1.6: there is not a single word about command-line possibilities. You have to do some sort of upgrade even for its help - and that upgrade did not work at my place. Adding of individual files is desperately slow. The producer of DataArmour think that user should learn his own specific terminology and so called RuleEditor for using his program! So the directory is called "node", and files are called "rules". God help us. Forget about DataArmour.
• GRBackPro 5.1.4.7: it has some good options but inside your zip file packs some additional data about file attributes. You should have the clear zip file without cluttering data but your own.
• NovaDisk+6.01: extremely slow at file addition.
• SolusZip 2.0 (build 009): one that got the high score at first just to be declared bed at last. It is charming that programmer allowed you to choose between zip, lha, bh, cab, gzip, ar or jar formats! It has help in Spanish if you want to practice that language. It has no data on command-line options. But the main point here is that according to my experience, that program has caused serious malfunctions on two of my Windows NT machines. So fine outside but so ugly inside!
• MyOwnBackup 2.1 No, fortunately for me and my (already) ruined reputation, this shareware program is neither my own backup, nor I made it. On my Windows NT computer it simple does not work. I tried on the other computer and the situation was the same. That program would surely stay to be only the program for his programmer and nobody else. What a protection!
• TaskZip: works only as a scheduler - no manual backup at all. Obviously the company who made it think that all computer users have brain malfunction.
• BackAgain II 2.10b: proprietary backup format.
• XPressBackup 1.6.1.2: have some bug about subdirectories specification but that can be solved. The exclude option does not work. The IncludeSubdirectories option does not work if subdirectories are lower in the directory hierarchy. The program is very early beta version.
• ZipBackup: no command-line.
• EaseBackup 1.0: Subdirectories option is not selectable on individual directory-bases, it is either for all directories or none of them. There is no help. The program is beta-version for sure.
• ZipMagic: it is some kind of file manager incorporated into file system, so you don't see your zip files - you see only their contents. No command-line, very modest option for backup.
• MegaSafe: no command-line.
• StarDotZip: no command-line.
• PowerArchiver: very limited command-line options.
• Godezip 2000: seems without command-line option.
• TurboZip Express 1.0.3: unstable when I tried it. No command-line.
• ZipMan 99 Deluxe 1.0: does not work on my Windows NT.
• TurboZip 4.01: similar to older version.
• BackupXPress Pro: close to my criteria but not easily used when you have a files scattered on disk.
• Backup 2000 v 2.0 build 39: this program is the winner. It fulfills my basic criteria and also has a descent set of nice features that recommends it to be used as a solid product for everyday use. The interface I dislike: not only it's look, but also the file and directory pickup which is far from brilliant but the program can fulfill all the functions I asked for. Till now it is very stable and easy to use. So far - so good. The program and the description of features can be found at http://www.overware.com.

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