Both are beneficial and, in theory, any woman or man could be living healthily, just as he or she could be performing their backups on a regular basis. Needles to say, many lack the necessary discipline, and fail in both tasks at least in some periods of their life (myself included).

If you work in a large company at an IT department, then things are a bit easier – usually there is someone else responsible for making your backups, and you just have to remember not to put your important files into the areas which are not backed up routinely by your company, like for instance in c:\temp.

These last few years, I have been working as a freelancer, and my notebook became my main and only machine. Almost all of my work is on it, and I carry it around wherever I go each day, like a true notebook warrior. Pretty soon it dawned on me that it was getting kind of quite important to back it up on a regular basis.

As external USB disks are so cheap and easily available nowadays, the question of backup medium was a no brainer. But it took me much more time to find the software that I felt comfortable using and could afford. Many USB disks (at least brand names) come with some backup software. At first, I would install and try them out but it would not take longer than a day before I uninstalled them in disappointment. Mostly because many of them were trying to make backups simpler than realistically possible by continuously watching out for changed files in the background and backing them up automatically. Boy, how that can cripple the machine! Not to mention that I was pretty sure they would miss backing up a file or two over time. After that, I briefly considered professional backup tools used to back up network servers but those seemed way too big and pricey. Then I tried several shareware backups only to find, after a few days of poking around, something crucial (at least to my mind) missing.

And when I was almost ready to give up, I stumbled on this little gem: SyncBackSE from TwoBrightSparks. It is a very solid program that does everything to reliably back your computer to the external disk in a way that suits your needs. You can have your first backup started in a matter of minutes but, since the program has a number of modes of operation and even more associated options, it is worthwhile to invest some time and tune its operation to your particular needs.

Luckily, it comes with a great online/help tutorial, which explains exact meanings and consequences of all options and operation modes. In addition, it also supports backups to/from ftp server, so it can also easily be used to perform backup to a remote ftp server, or to backup some hosted server to a local machine. And all that for a very reasonable price!

I have two docking stations, one in my apartment in Zagreb and other in my family's weekend cottage on the Kupa river, where I usually spend a few days a week. I have USB disks permanently connected to both docking stations to perform nightly backups. And in addition, from time to time I do a full backup to a separate 2.5in disk, and take it to the safety vault in the bank. So, I guess this should get me pretty much covered.

Have a happy computing till my next post, and keep your computers backed up!