Fair Backup

Ultimately, there are two sets of backup software: free or shareware (paid software). Which one do you want to use for your backups?

Basically, it all comes down to how bad you need to backup and how you want to backup. If you backup once a month and you don’t necessarily worry about losing your files, you can either backup manually or use some free backup program.

If you backup important files (work documents, often-updated files, Outlook mail messages, etc), you’ll need to use a program that can run a scheduled backup. Of course, there may be free programs for this, but every shareware tool can run a scheduled backup, that’s for sure.

If you want to compress, encrypt your files, schedule your backup to backup to some obscure backup medium, you’ll be looking for a paid version of your backup utility.

Normally, the program that can compress, encrypt files, schedule backups and backup to an external USB drive, a flash drive or an online FTP server will cost about $30-70, depending on the manufacturer and other features.

If you want to run the backup as a service, you’ll need to find some specific backup software for this, because not every program can run as a service under Windows NT. You’ll be paying about $10-30 for the ability to let your backup to run as a service in the background.

Clearly, it is up to you whether to backup manually, use free backup tools or shareware programs, but if you want a reliable backup, you’d rather pay now not to pay twice later.