Cobian Backup on Windows XP - Software Review

Robbie Ferguson: So the software that I want to look at tonight for Windows XP is called Cobian Backup and this is available free of charge through Cobian site and we’re actually going to just bring this right up into Windows XP and in the course of the series it’s a four part series. We’re going to be looking at Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux and Mac OS so we’re going to be taking a look at different backup options for all four of those Operating Systems and a lot of this information obviously transcends the operating system that we’re using. Tonight we’re looking at Windows XP but a lot of what we do here is going to transcend to Windows Vista and as well as that some of the techniques and just the theory behind is also going to work with any operating system regardless of whether we feature it or not. So a Cobian site is at educ. Short for Education .ume.se/cobian backup. You can find this in Google or you can visit our website Category5.tv and we’ll link to this and if you’re interested in using open source software you can use Cobian Backup version 8 with version 9. He unfortunately had to close the source. So we’re going to go with backup number 8 which is Open Source and that’s going to give us this free software that we can get off right in the website. This is just be software that I really like because it allows us to do backups with the different systems but at the same time we can do the FTP backups and things like that. Choose your language, this is the license agreement. Now this screen here is asking us how we would like to install Cobian backup where we would like to be a service, would we like to run it is an application. So basically when you run a backup software as a service it’s going to run on your system regardless of who’s logged in to your computer, regardless of if somebody has logged in to you your computer. So running it is as a service is going to basically have it running in the background and you don’t have to intervene. You don’t have to make sure that you’re logged into the computer for example like some old stuff where I didn’t run the services so very nice there. And then just so I’m going to run this as a service and you can go through if you have advanced user settings and things like that for permissions on a networking you may need to use a different user account but essentially you should be able to just run it like this. So I’m just going to go through the installation. If you have any questions for me just visit our website Category5.TV and, we’ve got the chat room open here. Carrie Webb: Sorry. Robbie Ferguson: So Cobian Backup 8 is now installed nice and quick. We’re going to hit done and you see that I’ve just got those off in their website. It’s free and it’s thrown this little icon down there so I’m going to bring up Cobian Backup by double clicking on the little moon at the bottom. That is the icon that you’re going to get if you’ve installed version 8 which is the open source edition. Version 9 is going to be a little mushroom so just that why that’s what we see down there. So first step is to right click on this left area here and basically the interface is pretty easy to figure out but right click on the area here, go new task and we’re going to go through setting up our backups so we’re going to call this My Backup and then you want to include your sub-directories, yes, etcetera, etcetera. Do you want to create separated backups using timestamps? This is like I was saying about like keeping you know being able to go back in time when it comes to your backup. So if you’d like to be able to do that make sure they use timestamps there. So let’s do that. This stuff we can leave the same and then we choose the backup type. We don’t want to go with full most likely because what’s going to happen then is no matter whether you’ve changed files on your computer or not it’s always going to backup everything. So what that means is if you’ve got all those pictures in your My Pictures folder and then you run your backup it’s going to backup every picture every single time you run that backups so it’s going to be this huge backup, it’s going to be very time consuming, you don’t want to do that. So the next one that we can choose is called incremental, Incremental is the one that we most commonly will use because that allows us to back up only the files that have changed since the last backup. So we can use that. Next is Differential which is going to back up only the files that are changed since the last fall backup and then dummy we’re not going to use. So then we can select how many backup copies we want to keep so this is going back in time. How many times do we want to be able to go back? So full copies to keep, we can set it to say two, we can set it to four and you can even just set it to one but let’s go with two. Make a full backup every let’s say six backups. So what happens there is we’ve got a full copy of our files every six backups and it’s going to keep that many copies. Honestly, you can play with some of these settings, give it a go and just make sure you’re happy with the results. Go on the files that we’re going to go add directory that’s why we want to add recursive directories and we’re going to go into your C drive. We’re going to go into Documents and Settings which is where all your user data is and you’re going to see your user Account. So I would have like Robbie, Carrie will have Carrie, in this instance because I’ve got it set up the way I do. I’ve just got up the Administrator. I’m going to back up Favorites for example. So I’m going to highlight favorites and hit okay. Then that adds that to my backup. I’m going to go through and you can backup as many things or as a few things as you want. I’m going to show you some of the stuff that you might not know about such as, if you’ve got Mozilla Firefox installed. I think it’s in their application data. Mozilla Firefox pretty sure, well. You now what we’re going to do in that instance. Let’s go add files because we just want those bookmarks we don’t want to lose the bookmarks that we’ve got bookmarked in Firefox, the arguments and settings, Administrator or whatever you use the name as, application data, Mozilla Firefox, Profile, whatever that is and then bookmarks.html. That’s your actual bookmarks in Firefox so we want just to backup that one file. We don’t’ need to save everything from that folder. We just need the bookmarks. Similarly, so we’re going to add directories here. Let’s get stuff like our Outlook Express, My Documents very important that contains you my music and my pictures. If you keep anything on your computer in an odd place make sure you serve for that as well. If you got something in the root folder of your C drive for example very importantly you back those up as well but essentially I’m showing you some of the stuff that you’ll definitely want to back up. Under local settings this is again under Documents and Settings and then your user account, local settings, application data, you’re going to see one called Microsoft and you’ve got Microsoft Outlook if you’re using Microsoft Outlook. So that’s like your PST files for Microsoft Outlook, email and your contacts and things like that so we’re going to back that up and then for Outlook Express on the other hand we’re going to find that under. I think it’s local settings, Application data identities and then you’ll see this big long thing, click on that Microsoft Outlook Express and then we’re going to get all these backups. So let’s say that, that’s everything that we need then we’re going to choose the destination so we can set this as a manual destination. We can set this as a directory which would be like an external drive or like I was saying there an FTP site and that’s going to allow you to set that a lot. So next, we need to set up the schedule. In our schedule we’re going to tell it whether we want to go how incrementally we want to run this backup. So let’s say we want to do this on a weekly basis. Let’s choose every Thursday at 6:42 pm whatever and that’s going to run automatically at that time to the destination that we want. We can compress. I’m going to let you go through the rest of the settings here. You can set it to add the files to a zip file and set up all that kind of stuff but not necessary if you’re not looking to incorrect things because it’s just your own data backup and things like that. This is going to slow down the backups. So that essentially in a nutshell is Cobian Backup and as you can see with features like being able to specify the destination that you’re going to be able to setup your schedule for the backup itself. As long as you’ve got the destination accessible so if it’s an external drive you’ve got to have that plug in at the time of the back up scheduled and then you’ll be able to proceed with that. In a case where let’s say, you want to run this manually, you can leave out the schedule all together and from then on when you see this little icon down here, anytime you want to run a backup manually you can just right click and go run all task now. So that’s how we would then perform a manual backup which may be handy for someone like my wife who just backs up her files occasionally onto her flash drive. So Carrie you’re back with us. Carrie Webb: Yes that was very good Robbie, good job. Robbie Ferguson: Did that make any sense? Carrie Webb: Yes.