Checklist

If you’re thinking of choosing backup software, here’s what to consider.

Why back up?

Hard drive failure is consistently the commonest fault reported in our annual computer reliability surveys. If you don’t back up your computer, think how much content you would lose. Documents, letters, emails, photos, movies, audio tracks and more would disappear, with a lot of personal content irreplaceable.

Why use backup software?

Backup programs offer many advantages over simply copying your files from one location to another. Good software can also:

• Assist in scheduling regular backups.
• Help restore data to your computer.
• Offer the option of data compression, meaning it takes up less room on your destination storage medium.

Backup types

• Full backup – saves all the data on your hard drive. While a full backup can take longer than other types to complete, it's an important task as it ensures you have a secondary copy of your data on hand in case of a hard drive crash or accidental file deletion.
• Incremental backup – saves every change made to files and folders since the last backup, allowing you to restore old copies of files that have become corrupted or misplaced. Incremental backups are quicker than full backups.
• Differential backup – saves only the latest versions of files and folders altered since the last full or incremental backup, replacing older data in the process. Differential backups are a much easier restore solution than incremental backups, as they require only the latest differential backup after a full restore.

Features

Here are some of the features of backup software, and what they mean:

Restoring
Restores data to a computer. Our test results include ratings on ease of restoring the backed up data using each program.

Scheduling
Allows you to specify a period for your software to start an automatic backup. Schedules can be set up as a one-off event or as a regular occurrence and are a handy time-saver.

Compression
Compresses the size of the backup data, conserving space on the destination media. However, using compression can take longer depending on the power of the PC's processor.

The degree to which files and folders can be compressed also depends on their content – data that is already in a compressed state (such as JPEG image files) won't compress as much as Word documents, for example.

Imaging
Takes a snapshot of the contents of your computer's hard drive, allowing you to restore a drive to a previous state. This is useful if your computer is no longer working correctly or you would like to transfer all your data to another computer.