GFI Backup Home Edition-backups made easy
Introduction
If you are in IT, then you know that the words ‘easy’ and ‘backups’ are not usually used in the same sentence, except when you say “I wish backups were easy.” Well GFI has granted your wish with GFI Backup Home Edition. Available for download from GFI’s website, it’s a fully functional, free backup solution intended for the home or power user.
Getting started
GFI Backup Home Edition is compatible with all workstation versions of Windows from NT through 7. It will not run on server SKUs. It is a quick (less than 12MB) download, and then an easy install process. Reboots are not
required, which is always a nice thing. Finishing the install launches the console by default.
The console
The console divides tasks into four categories; Backup, Restore, My Tasks, and Sync. In addition to scheduling tasks for automatic backups, you can use this software to sync files between two locations.
The Options section lets you set startup options, program defaults, email settings for sending reports/alerts, and other settings.
Backup
Wizard driven, you can customise all aspects of the backup; including name and details, source, destination, options, schedule, and a tab you can use to review events. Source selection uses standard directory browsing for selecting files/folders, and also allows you to specify registry keys, email settings from common clients, and user settings. The email is not just for mail; it can back up your accounts, settings, forms, rules and alerts, and signatures as well. User settings can back up your preferences for many common Windows programs, and Windows settings including your profile customisations, shortcuts, links, fonts, and scheduled tasks.
Supported destinations include local or external disk, network share, USB drive, burn to optical or FTP upload.
Options include compression standard zip or not, encrypting using either zip password or AES, whether to do a replace, incremental, or differential backups, and the ability to instead do stacked backups, with up to 100 versions saved.
Though this is targeted to the home user, I would have preferred that they either provided the actual behaviours with regards to the Archive Needed bit, or used different terms. As a power user, I don’t like to keep two vocabularies, and a differential backup backs up all the files that have changed since the last full backup…it has nothing to do with deleting files that don’t exist in the source location. I also wish there was the option for a Full Backup of the system so that you could do a full restore in the event of a system failure. If you are running a mission critical system that needs this level of protection, you might want to augment this with disk cloning.
The Scheduler tab lets you run jobs manually, at startup or shutdown, or on a one time or repeating schedule.
Restore
Restores are nice and simple, letting you restore an entire backup or individual files and folders. Make your choice, and you are taken to a panel to select which backup to use, and if you chose to restore individual files, you get a standard browser to select the files you need.
My Tasks
This panel shows you the tasks you have already created, and allows you to edit them, change their schedule, see the last time they ran, the next time they will run, current progress if they are running now, etc. You can also use this to create new backups and syncs if you want to go through all the settings in an advance panel, instead of using the wizards.
Sync
Sync lets you set up a process where all files in two locations are kept in sync. This can be done to the same locations as backups; local or external disk, network share, USB drive, burn to optical, and FTP upload. Files changes can be monitored just based on date stamp, or using CRC to make sure that another program didn’t modify the date stamp but not the actual data. And just like a backup, this can be done on demand, on event, or as a scheduled task.
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Wrap up
In a time where the phrase “you get what you pay for” implies a negative, it’s always nice to find something that is both useful and free. For the home user, power user who wants a strong backup solution for their laptop, or even as a solution for corporate users who work remotely, GFI Backup Home Edition delivers a great product in a small package whose price can’t be beat.
Backups use the Windows Volume Shadow Copy service (VSS) to grab open files without adding yet another driver to your system. Backup jobs appear to take a moment to start as VSS prepares its snapshot. With the console sitting at 0% for so long you might be worried that your backup is not working, but if you mouse over the status you can see in the popup that VSS is working. A little more informative display would be nice, but the net result is a backup that has no problems with open files, a memory footprint that remains small and negligible CPU overhead.
One of the things I liked most about this product is that it creates backups by either copying the files and folders directly, or by zipping them. I had no problems accessing a zip created by GFI Backup using 7-zip, even when I used encryption to protect them. The end result is a compressed backup in a standard file format, not a proprietary one, so your data is accessible even without the software installed.