I hadn’t intended to write about backup software today, but since it saved my bacon yesterday I have to recommend Cobian Backup software to you. Cobian Backup makes it very easy to schedule automatic backups of select folders on your computer. On my computer, Cobian backs up my most important files to external USB hard drive. Cobian Backup is free and it is easy to install and setup.
Thanks to Cobian Backup, after the primary hard drive in my PC crashed Tuesday night, I was able to restore copies of most of my important files from an external hard drive.
I say most of my important files because I had neglected to configure Cobian Backup to backup my Outlook email files. Due to that oversight I lost nine months of emails. Drat!
By the way, I have to warn you that inexpensive external hard drives fail way more frequently than they should. My first external hard drive went bad after 13 months of light use (one month past the warranty). Some of my friends and acquaintances have had similar problems. Now I only purchase (and recommend) external hard drives with five year warranties. My current external drive is a 500GB Seagate Free Agent. The Seagate drive costs about $20 more than the least expensive external hard drives of the same size, but, in my opinion, the five warranty justifies the additional expense.