Peter's Blog

Found Cobian Backup a nice windows tool for doing automated backups. What is nice about it is that it backs up to zip files so backups are nicely compressed in a non-proprietary format and restoring then does not need any special tools: I can browse the archives from salamander, view them and copy them individually or on mass. It can be set up to do incremental backups every day, a full backup every week and to keep backups of every backup so you have some kind of history.

I am using it simply to archive my work in progress: the computer I am using dies randomly once or twice a week and I don't trust it (it flashes a blue screen and reboots).

I set up the scheduler to do the backup every lunch time, backing up my desktop (where I chuck everything these days) to an external USB hard disk.

The only bugbear I have with it is that it is tedious to get it to exclude files by extension: you have to add them one at a time (click add, enter extension, ok, click add..) and with VC development there are many extensions that can be excluded from backup: my typical list of exclusions is:

• *.obj
• *.sbr
• *.bsc
• *.zip
• *.map
• *.wsp
• *.pdb
• *.pch
• *.tmp
• *.res
• *.ilk
• *.exp
• *.idb
• *.ncb
• *.opt
• *.plg

It seems to store it's configurations in C:\Program Files\Cobian Backup 7\DB\MainList.lst which is a text file so I edited it in Vim, rebooted Cobian and job done.

Many quality windows freeware tools listed here and here.

Another good source of free stuff is this.