By Merle Nicholson, President, Tampa PC Users Group
Boy, I like shareware. What a concept shareware is. I used Backer for more than a month before I decided that it did everything I needed. So I ordered it online, and they sent me a license a day later by email. Slick.
Backer 4.0 is file backup software, and I needed it to complement my current full backup scheme. If you remember from our January Bits-of-Blue, I set up a method of doing full image backups to a removable hard drive. I have three Pentium-like computers in the house and I’m trying my best to keep backups from ruling my life as much as possible and yet give me the best protection.
So I’m doing full image backups whenever I install something significant on the machines. But as important as it is to have full recovery capability, it doesn’t address keeping up with the files we generate daily in between when we make full backups.
Valerie does our Quicken financials and daily logs and accounting for her business. I generate accounting stuff, invoices and expenses for my business, in addition to my occasional programming projects, writing articles and course materials for my teaching. And what about things like internet email addresses, and recent email itself that you accumulate? If I have a full system failure, all my recent stuff will be lost.
So I went looking for shareware backup software. My requirements were simply this: On a daily basis, copy all new files generated on Valerie’s and my machines to a backup directory on the server over the network. I’ll admit I really did luck out on this one because I didn’t have to look at many before I found this on Shareware.com. It’s $35,and made by a German company, Leanware. It appears that this is their only product.
Backer 4 is a very slick, kind of complicated program that will synchronize directories between computers, between directories, between a desktop and notebook, over a network, to Zip drives, floppies or whatever. It has a time scheduler to do daily or weekly backups or whatever your needs are.
To understand what the complications are, let me explain directory synchronization. If you have a source directory that you want to duplicate elsewhere (called the destination directory), the rules are pretty easy. If a file has a later date in the source, copy it. If it doesn’t exist in the destination, copy it. If it is in the destination and not in the source, delete it from the destination. This is called one-way synchronization. Backer calls it "touch destination only" and needs the "erase destination" option.
Two way synchronization is harder. You’d use this if you had a notebook and a desktop and wanted to make sure certain directories were both the same, regardless of which machine you used. The basic rule is to move a copy of any file that has a later date to the other directory. The difficulty is in handling orphans. Let’s say you have one orphan in one of the directories. Is it an orphan because you deleted it from the other? Or is it orphaned because you created it here or copied it to here, and needed to duplicate it to the destination? Don’t know, can’t tell. For now, what you do is set an "overview" option so that it displays a very attractive, readable panel with a summary of all files it intends to copy or erase and which way it is to be copied so you can change it before it happens.
Leanware intends to improve on this in the next revision by (optionally) keeping a small database on each folder, so it can tell if a file was added (then copy it) or deleted from the other (then delete it).In Backer, you create a backup file that describes all you want to do on a particular source and destination drive. You set up all the rules, designate what directories you want to synchronize from and to. This becomes a "work file." The directory structure on the destination does not reflect the exact structure as the source. For instance, I created a single directory, "Backups", on my server, and then two more directories under that for Valerie’s and my machines. Underneath each of those, the directory structure reflects that of the source. I designate the directories, specify all files and all directories underneath those, select what file types to compare (by age), enforce (copy always regardless of age), erase, and exclude all using standard wildcard conventions.
Then, if you have more than one drive, either source or destination , you set up a "batch" file that will run any number of "work files".
All this is complicated. Leanware recognizes this and provides very exceptional help files. And it comes with a sample "learning" backer file. They specifically warn you to go about the process of setting up slowly. If you start by using advanced options right away, the program will pop up a warning that you may be in over your head, and suggests a sample file to work from. You can make the warning go away easily. I can’t say enough about the help files; they’re really excellent.
The shareware version is not much different from the licensed version. On the shareware version, it has a startup pop-up screen with an "agree" or "disagree" button to press. This effectively prevents you from scheduling it to run unattended. It alters the position of the buttons on each startup, I suppose, to keep you from starting it with a windows macro.
I registered my copy online from a jump from the Leanware website to a secure ordering service in this country. The next day I had an email from Leanware with the name and password. That made the startup panel go away, and now I have it running on my server. Daily, it goes out to the data directories on the other two machines and copies all the latest files. u