Backing up your critical files is often overlooked. People just think their data is secure when in reality the slightest virus, hardware failure, or fire can make years of work irreplaceable. That’s why it’s important to backup and do it often. Unfortunately backing up isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It takes time and persistence to ensure you always have a copy of your work. Luckily for us, there are several companies that have created some great backup utilities.

There is a whole breed of backup utilities designed for backing up your data automatically to secondary hard drives, other computer on your network, or even remote FTP servers, and that’s what we’re going to be focusing on today. This breed of backup utilities is really the holy grail of computer backups, because you don’t have to think about backing up; all you have to do is set it up and your data will always be secure.

The most popular backup utility in this class has always been Second Copy. As you may have guessed, the best does carry a price tag of $30. While that may be worth it for some, the majority of us are cheap, so that’s why we’ll be looking at the free alternative, SyncBack.

I’ve been using SyncBack for over a year now, and while it doesn’t come close to the amount of features Second Copy has, it gets the job done, which is the most important part. Unless you need features such as AES encryption and e-mail notifications, SyncBack will work just fine.

Now since these type of backup programs can be difficult to configure initially, I thought I’d give you a run though configuring SyncBack. Most backup utilities work in a similar fashion to SyncBack, so with a little bit of common sense you should easily be able to adapt these instructions to your program of choice. Alright, enough chatting, let’s get started.

After installing SyncBack, you’ll be presented with SyncBack’s main interface window. This window is where you’ll be able to find the status of all your backup profiles, as well as setup new profiles and schedule automatic backups.

To start backing up your critical files, we’ll need to create a new profile. In SyncBack, a profile is simply a set of instruction on what to backup, how to back it up, and where to store the backup. For each folder that you need to backup we’ll need to create a new profile. So, the profile creation process is something you will become accustom to by the time you have everything setup.

To start creating a profile, simply click the New button in the lower left of the main interface window. After clicking new, you’ll be presented with a window asking what type of profile you wish to create. Since this will be a backup profile, just click on backup and then click ok.

Now this next step can be a little scary, so take a deep breath and realize that you can’t mess anything up. After clicking ok, we’re going to see our main profile creation window. There are tons of settings on here, but luckily for us the defaults will suffice. All you really have to worry about is the two boxes at the top.

The two boxes at the top contain what’s going to be backed up, and where it’s going. Simply click the folders on the right-hand side of the box to bring up the familiar Windows’ folder select dialog. In the source box we’re going to put a folder that we want backed up. Common folders to backup include:

• The My Documents Folder
• C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Favorites for Internet Explorer Bookmarks
• Folders containing Mozilla Backup Files
• Any folders created by programs to store data.
• Folders on the desktop that contain documents.

Now in the destination box, we’re going to locate the location to save the backup. Common locations include:

• Secondary Hard Drive
• Remote Network Share
• FTP Server

Now that we have our source and destination boxes filled we can go ahead and click ok. If you want, you can play around with some of the settings on the other tabs before clicking ok, but for the majority of users the defaults will get the job done.

Now that we’ve clicked ok, we have new dialog box asking us if we want to run a simulated run. A simulated run won’t backup anything, it will just test to see if the source and destination locations are capable of completing the backup. I’ll leave this choice up to you as it really doesn’t affect that backup either way.

Now we should be back to the main program’s interface window, and you should be able to see your newly created profile in this window. If you really wanted to, you could stop here and manually run the backup task whenever, but we’re going to go that extra step and schedule an automatic backup. To begin the process, click on your newly created profile. There is button on the bottom of the screen that says Schedule. Go ahead and click that button.

Now at this point you might get two dialog boxes. The first dialog box will ask you if you want to create a new schedule profile, which is what we’re doing, so click yes. The next dialog box will mention about setting a password for the user account. We’ll get into that in a moment, but for now just click ok.

You should now be presented with a scheduled task window. This is the same window that most scheduled task use throughout Windows, so if you’ve ever setup an anti-virus, you may have run into this window before. If not, I’ll help you though it.

Firs things first, dealing with that stupid dialog box we just received. Basically all that message said was unless you setup the task with a Windows account that has a password associated with it, the task won’t run. Now if you have a Windows user account that contains a password, you can change the run as and set password areas to accommodate that account. If you don’t have an account with a password, no worries. You can check the “Run only if logged in” option and you won’t have to worry about a password. The only downfall to this is your backup will only run if you’re logged into the computer, which for single user computers probably won’t be a problem.

Now that we got that stupid Windows issue out of the way, we can deal with the important stuff; setting up the schedule. Simply flip the tab on the top to the Schedule tab, and we can begin configuring away.

As you can probably see, this window is pretty self-explanatory. You just pick a time, frequency, and day to run the task on and Windows will do it. Personally I recommend setting the backup to run once a week, at a time when you won’t be using the computer. Just make sure the computer is on during this time or your backup will never run.

Now that your schedule is setup, you can just click ok to this window and you should go back to the main program interface. Now you’re done setting up this profile. Be sure to repeat these steps for any other folders that need to be backed up. Once you have all your profiles created you can simply close the program. Since you created a task, SyncBack will automatically launch next time you need to backup.

Easy wasn’t it? I hope by following this guide you’ve finally made an important step toward backing up your critical documents. Just remember, data lose can strike at any time, so it’s always important to have a fresh backup on hand. Don’t think just because it has never happened to you that you’ll never loose your data.

Well, enjoy your freshly backed up computer, and if you have any recommendations for backup programs that you use, I’d love to hear them.