By pete -

Backing up your data – its like flossing. We all know we should do it, but really, who has the time..

LifeHacker, the blog that solves all kinds of problems that you didn’t realize you had (in a good way!) has a terrific  post about System Restore Tools, labeled “Five Best Free System Restore Tools“.

Weekly, they present a “High Five” feature which is essentially the results of an open forum to users, to get the “best of” a particular topic.  LH then presents a writeup of the top results – which is one of the best features of the site.

We highly recommend taking a look at the article – they give a good rundown of the following tools, as well as some other nice tidbits.

• Macrium Reflect Free
• DriveImageXML
• Paragon Drive Backup
• ImageX
• Clonezilla

via Lifehacker – Five Best Free System Restore Tools.

By pete -

We stumbled upon this create Lifehacker post today: “Backup Maker Offers Dead Simple Backup Creation”. In the writeup, they describe a very handy little (Windows) application, which is detailed in a post on MakeUseOf. It is pretty impressive, considering other applications that perform this task can hold pretty high price tags.  From the Lifehacker post:

Whether you’d like to backup to another disk, burn the files to a CD, or transfer them to a remote FTP site, Backup Maker has a variety of solutions to backup your data. It handles both the backup and the restoration of files and has an easy to use wizard for creation of scheduled backup routines. You can specify whether files are to be completely overwritten each time or only incrementally with files being replaced and added as they are altered. Restoration is just as simple with point and click dumping of your data from the backup to the previous location. The software is free, although after batch backups a nag screen does pop up suggesting potential upgrades to other software offered by the company.

The backup to FTP is a key feature for me. While I like a local backup since it writes faster, having my backup online is a major benefit – partly due to the fact that I have “unlimited” web space, but also because I know if my system melts down and somehow takes my external HDD with it – I can still grab this backup via FTP, anywhere and from any PC. Also worth mentioning is the app allows you to password protect the file – so even if your FTP site were somehow compromised, your backup is secure.

The application is available to download free, from Ascomp.de. Some screnshots are in the gallery below.

Anyone use this – or have other suggestions for backing up via FTP?