Backup Utilities - Make Your Choice!-00-1286

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There is no need to talk about the necessity of backup utilities to protect your home and business assets from data-loss of any kind. Today we will discuss another backup utilities question. It is a question of choice. Choosing suitable backup solution is as much important as choosing a car or house; you will have to interact with it every day. So it is a question of significance which cannot be overestimated.

Each man is unique; our jobs, families and interests differ, as well as our needs for backup utilities function set. Luckily backup software developers and manufacturers lay themselves out to help customers to meet all the expectations for backup utilities imaginable. Backup programs nowadays vary widely in capability, performance and implementation.

First, let's make it clear about backup basics. All existing backup utilities can be divided generally by three basic types of backup: full, incremental and differential.

Full backup allows you to make a reserve copy of all the data files and application settings on your personal computer in one shot. Sometimes backup utility supports one-click system ...
... backup capability which is very handy for computer novices. One-click system designed mainly for average home computers for full system backup with one click of a single button.

Differential backup is more for people who want to backup computer used for business or working from home in freelance mode. Differential backup only backups the files changed since last full backup. It is relatively slow and requires more storage place, but have a shorter restoration time.

Incremental backup is also used for business needs mostly and only backups the files changed since last backup no matter was it a full or an incremental. So it is much quicker and need less free space, but recovery takes longer time.

The second point to focus on is backup utility features. You are looking for best backup solution of your dream. So you always need to remember that backup software developers today offers a wide array of basic and advanced backup options, variety of special features and a great many of plug-ins to extend your backup utility to support any existing software data files and program settings.

Commercial backup software in most cases offers much more full-featured backup solutions with high flexible abilities to tune program up for any individual needs. On the other hand it's not good when your backup utility makes you jump through too many hoops when restoring files, isn't it?

Here is a short list of most important features to look for, but all the variety is so wide that you will have to make your own nice-to-have list between them:

One-click system backup is a way to backup your whole system with a single button click.
Files-In-Use backup used for several daily data backups when your computer is active.
Backup verification is necessary to ensure that reserve copy of your critical data is correct and viable.
Scheduling and automatic operation are usual options for commercial backup products which allows to run backup automatically in selected time period.
Backup type selection is an option to choose full, incremental, selective, differential or mirror backup type according to your individual requirements.
Encrypting and compression are both very important to keep your recovery data in secure and compact storage place.
Backup file filtering is essential feature to filter certain types of files for backup. High-quality utilities offer search strings and patterns to backup specified file types and directories.

The third and the last important aspect of choosing your best backup utility is a wide device support. How many hardware devices this software work with? Does your software offer remote backup service? Does it support USB flash drives, Zip, CD, DVD, HDD, and FTP, SFTP or online backup storage? If you can, use storage systems which are portable and best of all try to store them in a different location than your computer. However, choosing the backup storage is quite an interesting research issue in itself. May be we will return to it in one of the next backup utilities articles later.

About the Author:

Here is a selection of http://www.backuputilities.net/ (sorting out in various chapters - backup to DVD, http://www.backuputilities.net/hdd.html, etc.) for you to try them out. Make your choice!
Read more on http://composedarticles.co.za here.