Cobian Backup Utility

A few posts ago I made a ton­gue in cheek com­ment to bac­king up.  It did get me thin­king a little bit about good FREE, and you will notice I like free, bac­kup uti­li­ties that offe­red a good variety of bac­kup options (loca­tion, span­ning, archi­ving, and so on).

I came across Cobian.  This uti­lity has everything I believe the stan­dard user will need.  It can back up to net­work, FTP or disc.  The FTP is a great func­tion I think as it keeps your data sto­red off­site.  The one draw­back to that option is that you have to have FTP ser­ver to upload to, which can cost some money, though I will look for free data storage.

As I pla­yed with the appli­ca­tion it had a lot of fea­tu­res I would not have expec­ted, inc­lu­ding being able to sche­dule full or inc­re­men­tal upda­tes.  It will even send you an email follo­wing the bac­kup so that you can set it and for get it.

Set­ting up a sche­du­led run is easy as pie.  In the main inter­face you will create a new sche­dule and then select the tasks.  In the options of the task you can make selec­tions inc­lu­ding volume sha­dow copy, that is a great option so that sys­tem files will back up and you will not get the in use error.

You will be able to select the loca­tion of the files to back up: all dri­ves, just a spe­ci­fic fol­der, even exc­lu­sions of files or fol­der (do you really need to bac­kup your win­dows direc­tory when you truly just want per­so­nal stuff bac­ked up?).  You can even have the files archi­ved in either 7zip or win­zip, or just bac­ked up without com­pres­sion.  I would recom­mend using the com­pres­sion since it does save space on disc or FTP upload.  The one bene­fit to not doing that is you don’t have to open a span­ned archive (over mul­ti­ple disc) or down­load the full archive to get one sin­gle file.

Please try it out.  Hope­fully soon I will find out more about about free, repu­ta­ble online storage.

Direct Down­load:

  Cobian Bac­kup (9.8 MiB, 125 hits)