These are some wobbling times we're living, and this is because of the fast technological development that keeps throwing more and more great things at us, sometimes even faster than Katrina. Of course, I am talking about the Internet here and how it's become the most important service in many countries. With new vulnerabilities popping up every day and the innovative methods of damaging the digital property, backing up your data is no longer a necessity, it is a standard.

There are plenty of applications perfectly capable of making the backup procedure totally automatic with no effort or hassle on your part. If you think that a good data backup solution that offers great features for a good price is hard to find, you are totally wrong, because there is a hatful of programs ready to do this for free.

We have selected a few of them that offer safe backup for your files, without affecting your budget in any way. This means that they are absolutely free for home use for as long as you want and with no limitation in functionality. One of them, however, provides extra features covering extra needs for extra money. Actually it starts off as a freebie and if you long for some additional options, you will have to pay a fee, but we'll get to that later on.

GFI Backup Home Edition 2009

At the head of the list is GFI Backup, an application that became a freebie only recently, when Titan Backup was acquired by GFI Software. Actually users of Titan will find themselves in a familiar environment as there is almost nothing changed in the interface.

The four main menus in the interface contain options for creating backups, viewing previously created tasks, file restoration and synchronization jobs. For all these four menus there is a brief description of their purpose, thus making the use of the app a child's play even for a total noob.

Even if it is a freebie, GFI Backup goes past the regular expectations of simply copying data from one spot to another and eventually providing some light options such as placing the backup on a removable drive. This freebie goes as far as making FTP transfer possible, burning to CD/DVD, or placing the data in a LAN folder. And the options for wrapping everything up include ZIP compression, password protection and even AES encryption for more security.



Even more, it supports the two “smart” backup jobs, incremental (transfers only changed files) and differential (synchronizes the full backup with the source location). Besides the regular data you can use GFI Backup to safekeep your data with, the application also provides the possibility to store registry keys, email data from Windows Mail, Opera, Mozilla Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Eudora or Microsoft Outlook as well as user settings for different popular software.

The scheduling options available in the software are flexible enough to allow planning to run a task every few hours, on certain days of the week, on Windows shutdown/startup. To make it short, it practically supports all the schedule plans you need to run a task anytime you want.

File synchronization can sync data between 2 locations on the same computer or between two computers (network and FTP locations included).

GFI Backup is absolutely free for home use and englobes all the necessary options for a responsible backup procedure. Multiple tasks are supported, and the various scheduling infuses comfort and ease of use. You can also receive notifications via email about the success of the job or the errors encountered, thus having constant details on how each task is executed.



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