By Bob Rankin
Free Backup Software and Services
If you run a business on your computer, or just use it to store your personal documents, photos and music, a hard drive failure can be devastating. Failure to backup up your data on a regular basis can lead to data loss, heartbreak and costly recovery fees. If you’re not convinced, see my personal story in How I Got Hacked… And Why You MUST Have a Backup!. I’ve heard plenty of excuses for not backing up, but fortunately “backup software is too expensive” no longer applies.
There are several free backup software tools and even free online backup services that you can use to backup and restore your files. There is a free backup utility that comes with Windows XP and Vista. I don’t generally recommend it, because the feature set is pretty basic, and not all features are available in all versions of Windows. However, Windows 7 has a much improved backup feature. See my article Windows 7 Backup and Restore for the pros and cons.
If you have a Mac, Time Machine is an excellent automatic backup tool that’s built into Mac OS X Leopard and higher. Backups are automatic, and if you lose a file, or need to see how it looked in the past, you can recover it with a few clicks.
The free backup software that comes with Mac and Windows 7 computers will do the job, but other 3rd-party backup products offer more features and flexibility. So let’s look at a handful of free downloadable backup solutions.
This excerpt is shared with permission from Bob Rankin.
