I was looking for a free solution for doing backups on a peer to peer network. After a few minutes of sifting through google I came across sync back. Setting it up was easy. Quick download and install. There is a check box that I had to un-check that wanted to put the yahoo toolbar on my computer. Other than that it went smoothly.

How does it work:

It’s a pretty straight forward back up. You open the software and create back up profiles. A back up profile is back up instructions with a nickname. You select the folder you want to back up, then you select where you would like it to go. Sync back copies all the files over as they are, it doesn’t use its own compression. This makes it really easy to restore files you need without having to rely on the back up software for restoration. Sync back also supports backing all the backup files into a password protected zip file, in case your backing up sensitive information to an unsecured location.

My Personal experience with this software:

I run a small office network with a few different windows machines. As in most office settings it’s hard to force users to work off the network, working locally is much faster. However I still want to protect their files. The solution I came up with was to install sync back on all their machines and run nightly backups Monday-Friday to the network. This worked out very well. Now all I have to do is back up the network to a remote drive and walk out of the office.

I also tried to use sync back to back up the network. This is a much bigger task than using it on personal desktops. The software worked well enough, but I wasn’t  confident that it was copying everything. The total size of the files on shared file hard drive is 120GB. When sync back finished its task I noticed that the backup hard drive only had 108GB of data on it. I could do some tweaking, but I don’t think I would be comfortable using this software for such an important back up.

Conclusion

Sync Back is an easy to use, free, back up software. It does a good job on small non complicated backups and has some nifty options. I wouldn’t recommend that any IT people use the free version on important back ups, because it seems a little buggy, and losing data (and your job) isn’t worth it.

Instructional Video

I did a quick youtube search to see if anyone had some live examples on sync back in action. I found this “how to” video. It should answer any other questions you may have about this software.