I am sure you thought that the story was over after reading last week's cell phone column. But as my readers know, chaos often reigns here at Bob's electronic world and there is now more to the story. But I don't believe in getting the column too involved in one particular topic, and the story is in fact not finished yet. Stick around for a few months and there will be an answer.
I haven't written a column on backups recently, although this is of course a very important topic. With the availability of cheap and capacious external hard drives, backup is now easy to do. Or is it? I consistently get requests for information on backup software, so I thought I would discuss the only one I use - Second Copy 7.
Second Copy has been around for about ten years - a long time in the software business. But it is still very popular among the techies, and has just won the Reader's Choice Award for Best Overall Utility from the Shareware Industry Awards for the sixth time!
The beauty of Second Copy is that it basically does one thing, and does it very well. It simply exists only to synchronize (copy) data (files) from Point A to Point B. That's it - nothing fancy, nothing splashy. Point A and Point B can be pretty much anything - hard drives, network data, external hard drives, diskettes, whatever. As most programs, though, it doesn't copy directly to CDs or DVDs unless you have special software running in your PC to allow that.
To start any backup process, you need to know where your stuff is. I have discussed that in many previous columns, but this is something you really need to do for yourself. No program can tell you exactly where all of your data is - you have to get involved here. If some program purports to magically know where all your stuff is, and back it up, don't trust it. There are lots of places to put stuff on your C: drive and no program knows them all.
Now that you know where your data is, you go into Second Copy and create one or more jobs, or Profiles as SC calls them. (Use Custom Setup if you want more options). Each profile defines one copy job; you set it up by specifying (with prompts) "What?", "Which Files?", "Where?", "When?", and "How?".
"What?" is the folder you wish to copy from (the source); in "Which Files?" you can specify subfolders or file types; "Where?" allows you to specify where the data gets copied to (the destination); in "When?" you can specify how often (or manually) the data is to be copied, and "How?" allows you to specify the type of copy being done.
It is in the "When?" and "How?" that the magic begins. Using "When?" you can control when the copying automatically occurs - it could be a couple of hours, or days, or a certain day of the week, or even when any of the files in the "What?" folder change. For example, if you set up to copy My Documents to an external HD every 2 hours this will in-effect backup your documents automatically and in the background every few hours. The backup does not take much system resource as it checks and only copies files that have been modified (if you select that option).
"How?" gives you a number of ways to copy. A Simple Copy is just that - anything in the source gets copied to the destination. You can also select Exact Copy which will delete any files in the destination that you have deleted in the source. But you probably would not want to use Exact Copy for backups in case you want to get an old file back after deletion. There are more copying modes - read up on them. You can also specify how many versions of deleted files are to be kept, and a number of Advanced Properties. In this last category, I usually choose "Skip destination if course has not changed" for performance reasons, and "Compare files after copy" to ensure that the data copied is correct.
Yes, Second Copy is a bit techie, but a little time spent learning it will yield accurate and effortless backups. You can get it for $29.95 from www.centered.com. A free 30 day trial download is fully functional, except that you can't change or add profiles after 30 days.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)