Automatic backup software recommendations

Garg

Something I've been wondering lately is what the best options are for automatic data backups. Something that only needs to copy changed files would be ideal, so would a cheap or free license.

A friend of mine is looking for options, and would likely be willing to pay for simple, effective software. So would I, but I'm also willing to hack something together using free options with more complexity, so long as it's effective.

Any suggestions? Googling this topic brings up mostly advertisements and download sites.

ardichoke

Depends on what OS you're running. The built in Windows 7 backup util has actually been doing a surprisingly good job for me. Back when I used XP, I used Cobian backup which also did a sufficiently good job, though there wasn't a nice interface for restoring backups (you just had to open the archive and restore the files by hand).

kryyst

If you want simple basic ease of use the windows backup works well. If you want something you can hack together and have fun with there's rsync. If you don't want to create your own rsync backup routines then check out DeltaCopy which is basically a nice gui front end for rsync on windows.

ardichoke

Ohhh... I have a pretty nice rsync script for doing incremental backups that I wrote... it will only work on Linux though. It could probably be ported to windows (is there an rsync for windows?)

kryyst

there isn't an rsync directly for windows but you just need a couple dll's from cygwin for it to work. The scripts are mostly translatable you just have to change the way drive's are called so c: is cygwin\c\ for example.

Garg

Thanks for the tips, guys! I'll have my friend look into the Windows options, and I'll check out DeltaCopy.