probably one of the easiest and cheapest ways to protect hours
of work and personal files from all sorts of technical
disasters. Still, billions of dollars are lost every year
because of technical problems and loss of data. WinBackup is a
new backup solution from LI Utilities that makes it easier for
home users and small companies to create secure and
well-organized data backups.
Organizing Backups by Priority When running backups on a daily
basis it is very important that the backup process does not
interfere with the normal tasks performed on your computer.
Running a large harddrive backup of all files on your pc can
take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour depending on
how fast your computer is and the number of files that need to
be copied. Since a backup operation will slow down your system
considerably while in progress it is often necessary to split
your backups into several backup jobs. By running more important
jobs more often and by backing up static files less often you
can easily reduce interference caused by backup operations by
90% or more. Not only will splitting and prioritising backups
make your system run much smoother, but you will also be able to
update important backups of emails and other data much more
often.
Scheduling Backups In order to keep you pc backups up to date
you will probably want to schedule backups to run automatically.
WinBackup uses a built-in scheduler that makes this task very
easy. Since WinBackup also supports any number of Backup Jobs
with separate scheduling settings you can make more important
jobs, like emails, run more often while large, infrequently
updated, files are backed up only every other week or so. Using
WinBackup you can even combine-scheduled backups with manual
backups to ensure that important changes gets backed up
immediately. Since you use the same Backup Jobs for scheduled
and manual file backups, running a manual file backup can be
done with a single mouse click.
Compressing Data Backups In most cases, compressing backups can
be a very good idea since many files that are commonly included
in backups (emails, text documents or images) can often be
compressed to 50% of their original size or less. If you are
using WinBackup, compression is enabled by default. In WinBackup
you can also find out how large the compressed file will be
before running the backup by looking at the estimated compressed
size value. This value is updated in real-time while you add or
remove files to the backup and can be very helpful when
determining if the backup will fit on the target harddrive or cd.
Secure Online Backups After creating a computer backup you will
probably store the backup on a CD, a shared file server or maybe
even on the Internet. In order to protect you files it is often
recommended that you use a password, or if the backup contains
sensitive information, you should use some form of encryption.
WinBackup supports both password protection and strong
encryption using the AES 128 or 256-bit encryption standard.
Encrypted backup files will be nearly impossible to open without
the correct password can safely be stored on CDs and public
servers. If you want to run online backups encryption is often
critical to protect your data from unauthorized accesses.
A Network Backup System Corporate users as well as home users
with local networks will often want to backup several computers
to a server and then backup the server to a CD, CDRW or DVD.
This can be achieved by scheduling the workstations to backup
their files to the server first, and then, after waiting for an
hour or two, a scheduled bakup job on the server stores all the
workstation backups to a CD Writer installed in the server. By
layering backups this way you can easily backup entire networks
and data can be restored by workstation users at any time since
the backup files for individual systems remain on the server.
This technique can be very efficient and can save a lot of time
for end users as well as IT departments.
Windows Backups and File Sharing Problems If you have ever tried
to delete or rename an exe file that being executed, you
probably know that locked files can sometimes cause serious
problems. This is even more true when creating backups since
many of the files that you backup will probably be locked by
other programs when the backup operation is started. If you, for
example, are using outlook when a scheduled backup operation
starts, the whole operation could fail if the backup software
attempts to lock the email database. WinBackup never tries to
lock files and will continue a backup operation even if a file
could not be read. Any missing files will be added to the log
and will be backed up the next time the backup job is executed.
Since WinBackup doesn't lock files it will not prevent you from
using your computer for other tasks while a backup operation is
in progress. This is very important if you want to run scheduled
operations in the background while you are working.
Author: Emil Malmberg
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