Simple and Effective PC Backup

General information:

Backing up files on your PC's hard disk is an essential task if you wish to preserve your cherished data against hard disk failure. There are many ways of doing this and Windows comes default with its own backup utility. My preferred way is using a neat little utility called cwrsync.

The advantage of using cwrsync is that it is a highly configurable program with a small footprint, and supports incremental backup. What the latter means is that the backup utility only copies files that have changed. Translating this into PC performance, this means that the time required to complete backup activities over time will be considerably shorten. Best of all, the program works on Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/2003.

Download and Installation:

(a) You can grab the installer here. Once downloaded, scan to make sure the package in virus free and if so, extract the zipped contents to some folder e.g. c:\temp.

(b) Once extracted, double-click the installer to start the installation. You can accept the default install program directory (c:\Program Files\cwrsync) or specify somewhere of your preference.

(c) Once the installation completes, navigate to the installed \cwrsync program directory (e.g. c:\Program Files\cwrsync). You should find a file called "cwrsync.cmd".

How to Use cwrsync:

Suppose you wish to back up files from a folder on your hard disk located at "c:\MyFolder\" to a USB hard drive, this is what you can do:

(a) Open the cwrsync.cmd file using a text editor

(b) Scroll to the bottom of the file

(c) Add and save the following entry in the "cwrsync.cmd" file:
     rsync --progress --stats -aztr /cygdrive/c/MyFolder /cygdrive/g/BackUp

When keying in the above entry, pay attention to the forward slashes (/) and the word /cygdrive. Simply stated, what the above entry does is to copy contents (files and sub-directories) from location "c:\MyFolder" into location "g:\BackUp".

In the above example, "g:" is my external USB hard drive and "\BackUp" is a sub-directory that I have created inside my "g:" drive to store my backup.

You can create more entries by adding and modifying the above command line.

It's that simple. Enjoy!