One solution is to have more than one backup disk. The more disks you have, the better protected you’ll be. With portable disk drives so cheap and easily available, it’s possible to have one backup disk for every day of the week. Label them up with that days Monday through to Sunday, and do a full backup onto each of them. After that, you can do an incremental backup each day, and you’ll effectively have seven backups of your hard-drive. So if one backup fails, you have six more to rely on. The chances of even two of your backups failing are remote, let alone seven. In fact, the odds of that happening are astronomical.

However, have you considered what would happen if your house were broken into or you suffer some kind of damage such as a fire? In these situations you could easily lose your computer and all your backups at the same time. In many cases, the data you own is much more valuable than the hardware, so you should make a plan to keep the data safe at all times. The best way to do this is to have a copy of your data offsite. If you work in an office, you could consider taking a backup disk to work with you. A simple rotation system would mean that you have a copy of your most recent data kept in your desk draw at work. You take a new disk with you one day, and bring home the old one. The chances of both your home and your office burning down or being broken into at the same time is just as remote as all your backups being damages. In addition, you’ll usually have a disk with you in transit, so at any one time you’ll actually have your data in three different places.

Other options include backing up your data to an online service. This can be just as costly as buying disks, and depending on the amount of data could take a very long time to upload and download, especially if you have movie files you want to protect.

You’ll also want to consider using encryption on your disks if you’re leaving personal data on your backups, especially in an unattended office overnight. There are many free programs such as Truecrypt that you can use to encrypt your data backups on the fly, to automatically protect your data.

Ocster Backup Pro displays a wizard on startup that links to four program modules. Those modules can be used to create a new backup, restore an existing backup, manage backup plans which are the backups that have already been created and view backup reports to take a look at the reports of previous backups.

Wizards guide the user through creating and restoring backups on the computer system.

A new backup is for instance created by first selecting the backup storage which can either be a hard disk, external storage or network drive. There is also the option to store the data on a secure storage server provided by Ocster which comes as a price. This could be one of the reasons why no third party remote storage options are provided by the backup application.

The new backup plan can be created once the storage type has been selected by the computer user. It begins by specifying a backup location and backup name if local storage has been selected. The secure remote storage will open an authentication window instead.

The next screen of the backup wizard is used to select the files and folders that should be included in the backup. Ocster Backup 3 Pro offers several pre-selected folders and file types for a quick selection. This includes the MyDocuments, MyMusic, MyVideos and MyPictures folders as well as specific file types like photos, spreadsheets or text documents from all connected hard drives.

It is furthermore possible to select custom files and folders that the user wants to include in the backup.

The custom setting can be used to pick folders or files from connected storage devices so that they are included in the backup. Ocster Backup provides exclusion filters but not the hand inclusion filters so that only specific file types of a selected folder will be included in the backup.

The backup software offers to compress and encrypt the files of the backup to save storage space. Only proprietary compression formats are offered by the program which means that the backups can only be restored if the backup program is available and installed.

Backup plans can be scheduled so that they backups are created on a regular basis. Options are not that extensive as it is only possible to select a daily backup, weekly backup or no automatic backup.

Installation:

Ocster Backup Pro 3 is provided as a zip file that extracts into a setup.exe and a readme.txt. The program can be installed by double-clicking on the setup.exe. The program will display a Free Registration window upon startup. It is here that the user needs to request a free registration code by clicking on the Register for free button.

This will open a website with a short form where the name and email address need to be entered. The registration information will be send to the email address. This email contains another link to the Ocster website that will list the program’s serial number.

This serial number needs to be entered into the program to register the program.

Positive

• Easy to use thanks to wizards guiding the user
• Preset folders and file types that can be selected
• Reporting and logs
• Incremental backups supported (automatically)

Negative

• Proprietary compression formats, restore only possible with the backup software
• No file inclusion filters
• Insufficient scheduling options
• No remote backups
• No recovery CD

Ocster Backup Pro 3 is an easy to use backup program that lacks features and options in a few areas. The biggest problem for most users should be the proprietary compression options and the missing recovery CD in case the operating system fails to boot.

The Windows backup software is offered for free today at the Giveaway of the Day website. The homepage of the developer is available here.

The very same menu offers the ability to add filters that specify specific file extensions that should be included or excluded in the backup. Filters can easily be configured in the advanced options of the backup software program.

The options are also home to various other backup related settings including the configuration of compression and encryption settings, running programs before or after backup jobs, scheduling backups and selecting a backup type (full or mirror backups).

Probably the most interesting features are plugins that can be added to FBackup. A plugin is basically an xml file that has been created to backup specific data or programs. Several plugins are already supplied with the default installation which can be used to backup the My Documents folder or Microsoft Outlook data. Dozens of additional plugins can be downloaded from the plugin repository for data of Mozilla Firefox, Nero Burning Rom, Songbird, Thunderbird, Skype, Roboform, Mirc, ICQ, uTorrent, Opera and multiple other popular computer programs.

Each plugin can be added to the backup software easily and becomes then automatically available during the creation of new data backup jobs.

Free Backup can be downloaded directly from the developer’s website. It is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, windows Server 2003 and 2008. FBackup is free for both commercial and private use.

Internet Explorer Backup is a data backup software that can backup various Internet Explorer related settings and options such as favorites, proxy settings, autocomplete passwords, cookies or dialup accounts.

It can furthermore be used to migrate the backed up data to another computer system. Even more interesting is the fact that the data can be restored even if Internet Explorer versions differ. It is not a problem to backup Internet Explorer 5 data and restore it on a computer with Internet Explorer 6.

A few options are provided by the backup software upon execution. Data can be backed up or restored. There are additional options to rollback and to create scheduled backups.

A few additional settings can be configured after selecting the initial course of action. Backups can be compressed, password protected, verified and limited in size.

Supported Internet Explorer versions are Internet Explorer 4. 5.0x, 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0. Internet Explorer 8 beta is currently not supported by the backup software.

Goodsync provides the typical left / right interface that many file synchronization software programs use. One interesting aspect is that it can not only be used to keep files in sync but also to backup them. Both operations are started as so called jobs. A job consists of a few steps that the user has to configure.

A file synchronization requires the selection of two folders that should be kept in sync. This can be used to sync emails, documents, music and anything practically anything else that is needed in more than one folder.

The analyze button will scan both directories and display the folders, files, sizes and additional information of both sides. The program will also list the space requirements on both hard drives if the synchronization is started. All files and the direction that they are copied will be shown as well.

Goodsync can also change the display mode so that only conflicts, errors and other information such as the sync state will be displayed.

Users can finetune the process before starting the synchronization. It is for example possible to exclude folders or files from synchronization or change their direction. The default sync direction is a two-way sync but it is possible to change that to a one-way sync easily in the options.

Filters can be used to exclude certain files or folders from the synchronization. One of the most important aspects of a file synchronization software is the support of storage space. GoodSync supports synchronization and backups on local hard drives, network drives, ftp, sftp, Amazon S3, WebDav and WinMobile hardware. It is therefor no problem to sync files from ftp or sftp to the local computer.

Once everything has been configured according to your wishes you can the automatic options. It’s much like a scheduler. You can set the interval or event when the file synchronization software should analyze or sync files and what the software should do if conflicts are encountered.

The options are also the place to create global filters and to change other options like the buffer size or if locked files should be copied.

Experienced users will like the sheer amount of command line options that are provided by the file synchronization software. There is practically a switch for every option of the software to synchronize or backup files. It is possible to import or export the job list to run it on multiple computers.

Every user is able to create file synchronization or backup jobs with GoodSync in a few easy steps. Experts will love all the settings and options to tweak the software.

Five licenses of GoodSync are up for grabs. To win one simply leave a comment and tell us what you would sync or backup with it.