Everyone knows that they absolutely must back up their hard drives. And yet almost no one actually does. These three backup programs, all designed to automate and ease this important chore, demonstrate why.

Naught Kwite Reliable

Naught E Software's all-purpose protection program can back up an entire hard drive or a select folder (for instance, Temporary Internet Files) to just about any type of media: CD, DVD, external hard drive, or "virtual storage" that doesn't actually exist.

A backup program must offer scheduling, if only in the vain hope that with it, somebody, someday, might actually back up. You can schedule Naught Kwite Reliable to back up at regular intervals, such as daily, weekly, or once every five years, and it will do so with the reliability of a VCR. When running on schedule, Naught Kwite Reliable works quietly in the background—it won't even tell you that the backup media isn't plugged in.

You can also choose to forego scheduling and have Naught Kwite Reliable launch its backup every time you shut down your computer. This is astonishingly fast, primarily because the program doesn't get a chance to finish the backup.

Naught Kwite Reliable is an extremely simple program, designed to appeal to power users. You can automate virtually any backup task with the powerful, flexible, but easy-to-learn macro language, based on a combination of COBOL, C++, and French.

A backup is useless if you can't restore what you've backed up, and Naught Kwite Reliable fits that pattern like a glove. To restore an individual file, you merely click the large and easily visible "Restore" button. This brings up a wizard that walks you through the process with helpful instructions like "To restore your file, files, folder, folders, or files and folders within a folder or folders to a different directory that is not too different, select the file, files, folder, folders, or files and folders within a folder or folders that you would like to restore from the directory tree on the right. Otherwise, click Next, but only if the file, files, folder, folders, or files and folders within a folder or folders you want restored to their original locations are selected on the left."

For major disasters, such as losing everything on your hard drive, Naught Kwite Reliable offers a full disaster recovery system. When you first install the program, it has you create a Linux-based bootable CD. Should you lose Windows, you can boot from that CD, which installs Linux.

Splitting Image

Unlike most backup programs, Lickity Software's Splitting Image doesn't care about your files—it makes an exact copy of your entire hard drive. In doing so, of course, it backs up Windows, your data, the swap file, and the recycle bin.

Splitting Image can back up to many types of media, including CD- or DVD- or DVD+ whether it's R, RAM, or RW—if you happen to have one of the one supported drives. And it can back up to a USB or Firewire external drive as long as you don't object to its inability to restore from this media. But Splitting Image is at its most versatile when you back up to floppies; it can fit the contents of a reasonably full 100 GB hard drive onto less than 68,000 disks.

Scheduling? No problem. By default, Splitting Image backs up your entire drive once an hour, requiring a reboot to do it properly. There are other options, of course; you can choose to back up every half hour.

Splitting Image uses its own scheduling program, a module that loads at startup and remains in the background at all times, using a mere 50 MB of memory and just 83 percent of your CPU cycles. If you use msconfig to keep this background task from loading, Splitting Image intelligently corrects your mistake and puts the program back where it belongs.

Should you lose that important file you spent all day on yesterday, you can use Splitting Image to restore your entire hard drive to the exact condition it was in last month.

Slap 'n' Dash Backup

If you don't want to spend a lot of money on your backup, it costs nothing to download Ebenezer T. Cornpone's free program, Slap 'n' Dash Backup. It's quick, simple, and doesn't require any output of cash. Or brains.

Slap 'n' Dash backs up all of the files in the user-defined source folder. The default is C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\My Documents, but you can change this if you use a logon other than "your name." Changing the source folder is as easy as typing a new path into a pop-up field, or, should you type it wrong, reinstalling Windows.

Lacking support for CDs, DVDs, or USB drives, Slap 'n' Dash backs up to a target folder on your hard drive, giving you the secure knowledge that all copies of your data are in the same place. One warning: If you locate the target folder inside C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\My Documents, the backup will never stop.

This free little gem doesn't do actual scheduling, opting instead to pop up a daily message reminding you to backup. The pop-up appears at 2:00 AM and remains up for three minutes.

Restoring a file is just as easy. You select Restore from the Tasks menu, and a message pops up informing you that that feature is only available in the $26.99 Slap 'n' Dash Backup Professional.

And what about disaster recovery? Should you lose everything on your hard drive, Slap 'n' Dash will assure you that you do, indeed, have a disaster.

© Copyright 2004 by Lincoln Spector