Best backup software?
 

Anyone have any thoughts on what the best computer backup software is? I know Norton Ghost and Acronis are popular but they both seem to have tons of bad reviews. I'm a computer novice and I'm looking for something pretty simple to use with my external hard drive.

I use SyncBack, the SE version is free and pretty powerful. It backs up the lab computers in my office nightly, weekly, and monthly.

http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncbac...-features.html

What are you backing up? If you're running XP or 2000, NTBackup works fine for simple backups of files and it's built right in.

click Start

Select Run

Open: ntbackup

Click OK or press [enter]

i use Norton ghost 8.2 and it takes care of me just fine.

For free, ntbackup is effective and supports volume shadow copy service so open files aren't missed. It isn't exactly new-school though. It originated as a tape backup tool and things can get downright fugly. Its source path inclusion/exclusion handling is so funky I prefer xcopy for complex jobs.

Microsoft's synctoy is nice and simple for a<->b synchronizing, and free, but it needs .net and doesn't do shadow copies.

Syncback, as mentioned, is more full-featured, and free. The SE version adds goodies but costs a little.

Cobian backup is another interesting free one with simple version control. It can be configured to maintain the previous (n) versions of each file. With most programs you have to choose between synchronizing or adding, with the latter just stacking up new versions until you eventually have to prune the destination for free space. Cobian handles the pruning for you.

There are tons of options. Try searching places like softpedia.com for highly-rated freeware backup tools.

Thanks for the suggestions!