Karen's Replicator
I use Karen's Replicator to backup my wife's books-in-progress on a daily basis. It just does a backup - nothing fancy, no zipping, no proprietary compression, just copy from source to destination - fast!
You instantiate a separate job for each folder/file, with separate schedule if you want.
Big benefit is that you can go to the backup (Word files in this case) and open them without using the backup program.
There are more sophisticated backup programs out there, but this one is nice for data that you may want to recover if/when you toast the system or are going to re-load it. (I've been collecting programs to backup the systems with an eye to a clean install of Windows 7 next month.)
Review from "freewaregenius"
Description: Karen’s Replicator is a free backup and synchronization utility. It will backup files, directories, or entire drives from one drive/folder to another, including network drives. It also does scheduled backups, so you never need to remember to do a backup again.
This is a remarkably powerful program. Here’s what you need to know about it:
■Karen’s Replicator will allow you to choose source and backup destinations as you wish; it will not insist on replicating directory structure, as some other programs do.
■You can set the source and backup so that the latter will store all files from the original whether they currently exist there or not; i.e. deletion of file from source will not prompt deletion of same file that was previously backed up.
■Alternately, folders can mirror each other exactly, such that removal of a file from source will result in the same in destination
■You will discover that some folders you would want to mirror the originals, and others you would prefer to store everything that ever existed in the source directory. Karen’s Replicator will allow you to selectively apply these settings to specific folders or groups of folders.
■You can also set filters for the type of files that you do NOT want to back up. For example, you can tell Karen’s Replicator not to copy, say, shortcuts (.lnk ) or temp (.tmp) files. You can set these rules per folder or across the board.
■The program is set by default so that it will only copy changed files (will compare sizes and dates of last modification), but you could easily change these settings for each folder/group of folders if you want to.
■You can schedule Karen’s replicator to always run at a certain time each day or each hour or week or month (actually, you can even go down to minute level).
■First backups will typically take a while, in my experience, but after that it is a very fast process as the program only looks at files that have been changed.
Here’s what Karen’s Replicator will not do:
■The program copies files directly; it is not a zip backup utility (and all the better for it, in my opinion).
■It will not backup your files online to an FTP.
Author's site:
Karen's Replicator
Blurb from author:
Automatically backup files, directories, even entire drives! Karen's Replicator copies selected files from one drive/folder to another. Source and Destination folders can reside anywhere on your network.
Options include repeated copies at intervals as short as a few minutes, or as long as several months, copy only files that have changed, and the replication of folder and file deletions.
New features allow you to specify which files should not be copied, and also which days a file should be skipped!
