Personal Backup

According to Wikipedia, an accident is an unforeseen and unplanned event or circumstance. I bring that up to get to this: a data loss accident could be looming just around the corner, and if you’re not prepared, you may very well end up losing important information. If you don’t want to lose your data, you must make sure to back it up. That’s what you can do with the Juergen Rathlev-developed free Windows application Personal Backup. You can manually back up the data that matters to you or you can set it up so the application automatically does this for you.

The Personal Backup installation file weighs in at 6.6MB. You can install the application on Windows 7, Vista, XP, and older versions, but not as old as Windows 98 or ME, as these are no longer supported. To install Personal Backup, you need only run the aforementioned 6.6MB file and click through a simple setup wizard. Once it completes its job, the setup wizard invites you to launch the Personal Backup application.

The first time you run Personal Backup, because no backup tasks have been created yet, you are presented with the “Backup wizard” prompt. There are two options on this prompt, one for beginners and one for experienced users. The option for beginners invites you to launch a wizard that will help you set up a backup task. The one for advanced users directs you to Personal Backup’s main interface where you can manually set up a task. After you create your first backup task and save it, you will no longer be presented with the “Backup wizard” prompt. Don’t worry, you can access the wizard by clicking “New” from the upper left hand corner.

There are three key elements that you need to specify when creating a backup task: what, where, and how. “What” refers to the data you want to be backed up; you will get to pick the folders that you want backed up. “Where” refers to where you want your data to be backed up; you can choose to have it backed up to a local drive, to a network drive, or to a FTP server. “How” refers to the manner in which the backup task will be performed; you can choose to manually run the backup task when you feel like it, or you can schedule it so the task is performed automatically by Personal Backup. You can also choose if you want your data ta be backed up as separate files or as ZIP archives, if you want the data to be compressed, and if you want your data to be encrypted.

The “Backup wizard” will help you easily and rapidly specify what, where and how. You can, of course, do it all manually, but why bother when you have such ease of use at your disposal.

As mentioned above, Personal Backup is a free tool. The License Agreement the setup wizard presents to you says that “the program may be used by anyone, in any way, for any purpose, without charge.” Please note that donations are accepted. So if you enjoy using Personal Backup, consider making a donation to support the application’s development.

Personal Backup offers powerful data backup functionality for free and it provides a handy wizard so you can easily access said functionality. This is a must have tool for anyone who does not want to suffer the consequences of a data loss accident.