There are at least three good utilities for backing up your Firefox profiles, passwords, and settings. Which is all fine and good if you use Firefox. But if Opera is your web browser of choice, you're going to need a different tool. And that tool is called OperaFly.
OperaFly is an incredibly powerful and easy to use Windows utility for backing up Opera preferences. You can either install OperaFly to your PC or just unzip the no-install version and click the OperaFly.exe icon. The program will try to detect your Opera installation directory, and then you can select which aspects of your profile you want to backup. Want to save your bookmarks, but not your cookies? No problem.
Your settings will be saved in an FLY file, which you can then use to restore your settings. OperaFly could be a lifesaver if you're setting up a new computer or doing a clean install of Windows on your own system. Or you can make backups on a regular basis so that you won't lose your preferences in the event of a catostrophic PC issue.
OPIE is a Firefox add-on that lets you backup your other Firefox add-ons. While that might sound a lot like FEBE, another popular Firefox extension, there's at least one major difference: OPIE works with Firefox 3. Actually, make that two major differences, because OPIE also gives you the option of saving multiple extensions in one file, while FEBE users will need to install a separate application called CLEO.
You can use OPIE to choose from your list of installed plugins, selecting just the ones you want to backup, and where you want to save them. The result is a file which you can use to load your favorite plugins into Firefox on another machine.
Amic Email Backup is another new email backup solution, designed for ease-of-use and offering support for a wide variety of email accounts, such as Outlook Express, Outlook, Eudora, IncrediMail, Opera Mail, and more.
Amic Email Backup not only saves the text of the emails themselves, but the address books, settings, news accounts, message rules, blocked senders lists and signatures.
The program has two modes: Wizard and Standard mode. Obviously, the Wizard mode will walk you through creating, restoring, and/or scheduling your backup. Standard mode is for the tweakers and the customizers. The email backup can also be moved from one computer to another, handy if you're moving all of your information to a new computer.
In all, Amic Email Backup is a nice, and affordable (read: free) entry into the realm of automated email backup, though there wasn't much in the program that made us sit up and take notice. In other words, it's not the kind of thing that wars are started over, and not the kind of thing that makes us want to do cartwheels. But if you're looking for a free and simple email backup solution, believe us, you can do worse.
So you want to perform regular backups of all your important files, but you don't want to leave your computer on all night to run your backup software of choice. IdleBackup will copy your files to any hard drive, folder, or network drive only when your computer is idle.
You can set IdleBackup to run only when your system has been idle for a set number of minutes. And you can choose what idle means. By default, IdleBackup will start if you haven't touched the mouse or keyboard and when the CPU activity is low. But you can skip the CPU check and just monitor the mouse and keyboard activity, which makes it more likely that IdleBackup will spring into action when you leave the room for a few minutes.
The backup utility is pretty simple. You can choose the files and folders to backup, and that's about it. IdleBackup will perform incremental backups. But there's no restore feature, so you'll have to manually copy your files back to your PC manually if you need to recover them.
Looking for a free application that will automatically save backups of your important documents which you can retrieve if something goes horribly wrong with your term paper, business report, or terribly important letter to your friend in Nigeria who has a proposition for you? DocShield will scan a folder for changed files at regular intervals and save copies to an archive. If you want to restore a previous version, just right click on the file in the DocShield interface and select View to get a list of earlier versions. You can open old copies of your document or save them as new files.
DocShield is a free Windows application. You can pay for a license, but the licensed version doesn't add any functionality, just a license number. In many ways, DocShield works just like FileHamster, a similar app we covered last year. But DocShield does a few things FileHamster won't, like backing up files to an FTP site. There's also a DocShield USB utility which lets you carry a portable version of your backups on a USB flash drive.
Fireworks, parades, unicorns made of ice cream, pleasant leprechauns doing amusing jigs; these things are fun. Backing up files is not. If you disagree with this you may be a loser. Check that, you are a loser. Or a network admin. Wait, that should read AND a network admin. Boring network geeks aside, backing up files is important. Much like prostate exams. Important, but painful. If you're not backing up files at home, here's a free tool that you can use to get on board the fun bus.
AutoVer is about as straight forward as it gets. Easy to install and use, and does everything you'll need it to do. Plus some advanced features sure to keep the die-hards interested, such as version controlling. It's obviously not really something you'd want to use in a large scale work environment, but if you're to forgetful/lazy/narcoleptic to manually back up files on your home computer, it's worth a look at. Once you have it set up, it runs pretty well on it's own, and handles errors smoothly. It doesn't explode if your back up drive fails, or any of that fun stuff, and works with flash drives and the like. And the price is perfect. Mmmmfree.
Hinx Backup Easy is a free program for Windows that will back up your files to a remote server or local backup solution.
You know, it used to be that if our entire system crashed, and we had made no backups whatsoever, we could always blame the paucity of backup software on the market (and the resident difficulties of the few backup solutions available).
Today, we can no longer foist the blame on the lack of backup software. In the past few years, there has been a literal explosion of backup software (well, okay, it's actually metaphorical: we haven't seen any real software explosions lately. If you have, be sure to send us the YouTube link).
Now that we have finally realized that it doesn't take a monsoon or class 5 tornado to ruin our system, and now that there are lots of backup solutions out there, there's no excuse to neglect backing up anymore.
Hinx Backup Easy is a program that will help ease the transition into backup of your important files. The interface is selectively sparse, with three main tabs separating individual program tasks. The first tab is for setting up local backups (e.g. to a removable hard drive). The second tab is for configuring your FTP server options. The third tab offers scheduling options, along with the option to backup only the files modified since the last backup.
You can easily perform set-and-forget scheduled backups, and select only the particular folders and files you want backed up.
So what are you waiting for? Download Hinx Backup Easy and get to backuping.
If you've ever been through the hassle of moving an Outlook account to a new computer, or restoring an Outlook account that had been deleted or corrupted, then you need to take a long look at OutlookBackupPro.
OutlookBackupPro will backup everything associated with your email account, including signature files, customized stationary, templates, OutNote notes, and all registry entries and system settings associated with Outlook. It will also backup your Outlook PST files. For those among us that can't even remember our wedding anniversary, the program also offers set-and-forget automated backups.
Once the files are backed up, OutlookBackupPro can upload your files to any FTP server for safekeeping. Restoration is as simple as a mouse click.
OutlookBackupPro also allows you to backup any files or folders along with your Outlook backup, so you can back up whatever you want without leaving the program interface.
OutlookBackupPro is available as a 14 day demo, and costs $39.99 to register. OutlookBackupPro works with Outlook 2003 or 2007, and requires 2000, XP, or Vista.
BlogBackupOnline plans to end its public beta next week with the launch of version 1.5. Most existing users won't notice much difference. BlogBackupOnline will continue to scan your site daily and perform a complete backup of your Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, or other blog for free. But some customers with larger blogs will be prompted to sign up for a paid subscription.
The cutoff point is 5MB. While this might not sound like a lot, in our tests, we managed to backup nearly 400 blog posts while using less than 4MB. Users who need more storage space will have the option of purchasing 50MB for $49.95 per year or 1GB for $99.95 per year.
Users who haven't hit the 5MB point yet will be upgraded to BlogBackupOnline 1.5 automatically when the new version is launched. Anyone who's already over the 5MB limit will get a 6 week grace period to decide whether to upgrade.
If you're tired of online storage services that give you just a gigabyte or two of space for your files, you might want ot check out Wuala. It's a peer to peer storage solution, which means that you can store a near infinite amount of data online just by freeing up some space on your own hard drive to host other users' encrypted files. Wuala is currently in private alpha, but we've got 500 invites to give away. Read on to find out how to snag one.
When you first sign up for Wuala, you'll be able to upload up to 1GB. Once you've demonstrated that you've got a high speed internet connection and that your computer is on for more than 4 hours a day, Wuala will let you allocate free space on your hard drive for hosting other users files. If you make 10GB available, you'll be able to upload 10GB of your own files. Sharing 50GB will net you 50GB of online storage. And so on.
The program interface is familiar and easy to use. It looks a lot like Windows Explorer, with a system of folders and file icons. You can easily create or delete folders just by right-clicking to bring up a context menu. And you can either upload files by opening an "Add Files" window or just by dragging and dropping them from your desktop.
SuperDuper!, the long loved Mac backup utility, has finally been updated for Mac OS X Leopard.
You might be wondering how SuperDuper! finds a niche even after Apple's own backup utility, Time Machine, has been integrated into every Mac with Leopard installed. The developers of SuperDuper! think of their relationship to Time Machine as complementary rather than competitive. Here's why:
SuperDuper! is for the disasters, the floods, the clicking hard drives, the machines that refuse to boot, whereas Time Machine's strength lies in the easy recovery of a single folder, file, or group of files. Time Machine can restore a full system, but that's not its bread and butter (and restoring from Time Machines requires you to have your Leopard DVD at hand).
SuperDuper! creates a bootable clone of your hard drive (which you can even place side-by-side with a Time Machine backup, if you have the space). Even if the original hard drive has been rendered unusable, you can boot from the clone and continue working. Tres cool.
The SuperDuper! 2.5 update is free for all registered users.
Online backup provider Mozy has just introduced its enterprise backup solution, aptly named MozyEnterprise. We'd like to first point out that the name "MozyEnterprise" commits not one, but two egregious web 2.0 transgressions: cute misspellings of common words and removing all spaces from the name.
How's the service itself, you ask?
MozyEnterprise is offered as a fee-based subscription service. It remains an online backup solution, though Mozy has pumped up the security features: 448-bit Blowfish encryption and 128 bit SSL encryption, with the additional option of private encryption keys.
Other enterprise-themed features include:
Administrative console: Centrally manage end-user backups from any location through a web-based administrative console.
"Hot" backup of Exchange, and SQL server
Snapshot support: Restore from multiple file versions saved up to 30 days in the past.
Automatic or scheduled backup
If you're the network administrator of a large company, why don't you "mozy" on over (har-har) and check it out?
There are hundreds of ways to backup your important data. You can schedule automatic backups to a DVD-RW, spare hard drive, or use an offsite backup solution to save your data on a remote server in case anything ever happens to your PC. But while offsite services like Carbonite and Mozy provide a secure option for backing up your files online, neither is free (while Mozy offers a free service, account holders can only backup 2GB for free).
Zoogmo offers a novel approach to offsite backup. Instead of saving your files to a central server, this Windows application lets users create peer to peer networks to store files. So if you've got three or four friends with broadband connections and a few spare GB of disk space all you have to do is ask them to download and install Zoogmo and add you as a partner. When you initiate a backup, Zoogmo will check to see which of your partners are online and begin saving your files on their computers.
All your data will be encrypted so that nobody can access your files without your login information. So if you want to save your tax or medical documents offsite, there's little to no risk of your friends reading through them.
Zoogmo is currently in public beta, which means it's free for anyone to use. While in beta there's a file size limit of 50MB, so don't expect to backup your ripped DVD collection using Zoogmo.
Leopard's helpful backup tool, Time Machine, backs up your Mac every hour by default. However, that schedule may not suit your lifestyle. TimeMachineEditor is an application that allows you to configure a different interval for your backups. We like the granularity with which you can set Time Machine: "Once a day" (choose the hour), "Once a week" (choose the day and hour), "Once a month" (choose day of month and hour).
Time Machine is a godsend for those of us who don't backup as often as we should. However, Apple didn't offer many configuration options for Time Machine. TimeMachineEditor gives you some of this missing control.
Zmanda, a company who specializes in enterprise multi-platform network backup, has announced a partnership with Amazon.com to make their backup services work with Amazon's S3 storage service. Zmanda is a company which specializes in offering support around the Amanda backup software package.
Zmanda has been in business since 2005 and specialized in centralized enterprise backup with clients that work on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X and up until this point offered backup to disk and tape. Their new agreement with Amazon's S3 shows S3's influence in the off-site backup market. Amazon S3 offers very inexpensive, secure storage for individuals, developers, and companies.
To get started using Zmanda, visit their website and download the client appropriate for your computer. Also check out their press release for more information about the partnership with Amazon.
