Unless one has a business running on your trusty PC and require a quick restore of your system ASAP, then for most PC users at home their backup and restore strategies are more to do with restoring data which cannot be otherwise be recreated from installation discs or downloads off the Internet - data like letters, photographs, emails and other
personal data, such as settings for Microsoft Office.

With the price of hard drives being so competitive, the addition of a new disc drive for personal backups is a cheap and robust strategy to adopt. Also if you run a small network with plenty of free disk space on a drive in another PC, then one can adopt a backup strategy on the home network.

I have successfully installed a combination of the two strategies by installing extra drives in 2 PCs in Raid 0 mode for speed, and yet each has enough capacity to backup personal files from the other PC. In the event of a PC becoming inoperable, the worst situation for me is to install a new disk, reinstall Windows and the applications, and then copy over the personal items. Hardly a major task nor a task requiring the services of a rocket scientist to implement.

Although I could buy disk imaging software like Norton's Ghost, being just a home user wanting piece of mind rather than a hole in my pocket, I have found the freeware version of Syncback to be truly marvellous.

It is SyncBack Freeware V3.2.9 and can be found here http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html

The software is well tested and has some excellent features for the automated scheduling of backups to a network, including filters (files and directories), backup or synchronize, email notification plus too many others to mention. This is genuine freeware with no ads, so deserves our support.

Bob Corless