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Backing Up to Avoid Disaster

Creating backups of important files on a regular basis is probably one of the easiest and cheapest ways to protect hours of work and personal files from all sorts of technical disasters. Still, billions of dollars are lost every year because of technical problems and loss of data. WinBackup is a new backup solution from LI Utilities that makes it easier for home users and small companies to create secure and well-organized data backups.

Organizing Backups by Priority
When running backups on a daily basis, it is very important that the backup process does not interfere with the normal tasks performed on your computer. Running a large hard drive backup of all files on your computer can take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, depending on how fast your computer is and the number of files that need to be copied. Since a backup operation will slow down your system considerably while in progress, it is often necessary to split your backups into several backup jobs. By running more important jobs more often and by backing up static files less often, you can easily reduce interference caused by backup operations by 90% or more. Not only will splitting and prioritizing backups make your system run much smoother, but you will also be able to update important backups of emails and other data much more often.

Scheduling Backups
In order to keep your PC backups up-to-date, you will probably want to schedule backups to run automatically. WinBackup uses a built-in scheduler that makes this task very easy. Since WinBackup also supports any number of backup jobs with separate scheduling settings, you can make more important jobs such as emails run more often, while large, infrequently updated files are backed up only every other week or so. With WinBackup you can even combine scheduled backups with manual backups to ensure that important changes get backed up immediately. Since you use the same backup jobs for scheduled and manual file backups, running a manual file backup can be done with a single mouse click.

Compressing Data Backups
In most cases, compressing backups can be a very good idea since many files that are commonly included in backups (emails, text documents, or images) can often be compressed to 50 % of their original size or less. If you are using WinBackup, compression is enabled by default. In WinBackup, you can also find out how large the compressed file will be before running the backup by looking at the estimated compressed size value. This value is updated in real time while you add or remove files to the backup and can be very helpful when you want to determine if the backup will fit on the target hard drive or CD.

Secure Online Backups
After creating a computer backup you will probably store the backup on a CD or a shared file server, or maybe even on the Internet. In order to protect your files, it is often recommended that you use a password; or, if the backup contains sensitive information, you should use some form of encryption. WinBackup supports both password protection and strong encryption using the AES 128- or 256-bit encryption standard. Encrypted backup files will be nearly impossible to open without the correct password. The password can be safely stored on CDs and public servers. If you want to run online backups, encryption is often critical to protect your data from unauthorized accesses.

A Network Backup System
Corporate users as well as home users with local networks will often want to backup several computers to a server and then backup the server to a CD, CD-RW, or DVD. This can be achieved by scheduling the workstations to back up their files to the server first; and then, after waiting for an hour or two, a scheduled backup job on the server stores all the workstation backups to a CD writer installed in the server. By layering backups, you can easily back up entire networks; and data can be restored by workstation users at any time becasue the backup files for individual systems remain on the server. This technique can be very efficient and can save a lot of time for end users, as well as IT departments.

Windows Backups and File Sharing Problems
If you have ever tried to delete or rename an .exe file that is being executed, you probably know that locked files can sometimes cause serious problems. This is even more true when creating backups because many of the files that you back up will probably be locked by other programs when the backup operation is started. If, for example, you are using Outlook when a scheduled backup operation starts, the whole operation could fail if the backup software attempts to lock the email database. WinBackup never tries to lock files and will continue a backup operation even if a file could not be read. Any missing files will be added to the log and will be backed up the next time the backup job is executed. Since WinBackup doesn't lock files, it will not prevent you from using your computer for other tasks while a backup operation is in progress. This is very important if you want to run scheduled operations in the background while you are working.

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