Recently my wife's laptop got caught in a reboot loop, and it looked like it wasn't going to be salvagable. Our first questions? "What do we have saved on that machine?" "Is it backed up?" Unfortunately, the respective answers were "a lot," and "no." Fortunately, I was able to bring the machine back to life long enough to transfer data.

Now, we follow a modified version of an old computer gamer's credo: "Backup early, backup often." With about 20 minutes' setup time, and the freeware/shareware application SyncBack, every PC in our house is saving its own data from permanent extinction. (Sorry Mac users, I'm a PC and so is SyncBack.)

Syncback has a couple of features that work particularly well for me:

1. Online or offline backups. You'll be able to backup locally to an external drive, or remotely to an ftp server. (If a complete loss of your data would be as devastating to you as it would be to me, you'll want to do both.)
2. Automation. Backups only work if you ever actually... well, back up. No more "I gotta remember to burn those pictures to DVD." Just set it and forget it, as they say.
3. Multiple backup profiles. With SyncBack, you'll create backup profiles that allow you to schedule what data is backed up where, and when. Schedule backups for any time increments you prefer,  and create as many different backup profiles as you'd like. This way, a daily backup keeps your most recent files safe all the time, but an additional weekly backup can also save you from accidentally saving changes that you didn't mean to save, and an additional monthly backup can save you from mistakes that you didn't catch until much later.
4. Email Notifications. My biggest qualm about automated backups is never knowing if they are successful without checking. And if I could remember to check, I could remember to just backup myself! SyncBack has that solved too, with customizable email notifications that can let you know every time a backup is successful (if you need to know for sure, every day), or just when there was a problem (if you don't want to get over-spammed, like me.

SyncBack has been a huge relief for us. It's never fun to have a machine die at an inopportune time (is there an opportune time for system failure?), but now we know that our data is safe no matter what. Check out SyncBack at 2BrightSparks's homepage to install your own safety net.

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