SharePod for iPod owners

SharePod lets you backup your iPod files to your computer, without any limits which iTunes might impose.  Also iPhone and iPod Touch support.  Freeware.

CrashPlan – Automatic Online Backup

CrashPlan – Automatic Online Backup comes in free and pay flavors.

This allows you to backup your computer automatically — to elsewhere on your own computer, to an external drive, to another computer.  The software for this is free for personal use.

If you want to backup to CrashPlan’s service online, there is a regular fee to compress and save using “industrial grade private key encryption to secure your files before they’re backed up. The only person who can decrypt your files is you.”

Note that as of October 2009, the lowest annual fee is $54/year for unlimited storage.  On one hand, it’s not as fast as locally backing up, and costs more in the long run, but on the other hand, it’s not vulnerable to anything stolen/damaged/broken at your end.

Use at your own risk, like any such service.

Free Drive Backup Express

Paragon Software offers Free Drive Backup Express – their Free Backup Software.

Supported Operating Systems

• Windows Vista (32/64-bit)
• Windows XP Professional SP2 (32/64-bit)
• Windows XP Home SP2
• Windows 2000 Professional SP4

Supported Hard Drives and Removable Media

• Parallel ATA (IDE) HDD
• Serial ATA (SATA) HDD
• External SATA (eSATA) HDD
• SCSI HDD
• All levels of SCSI, IDE and SATA RAID controllers
• USB 1.x/2.0 and IEEE 1394 (FireWire) devices
• PC card storage devices

Supported File Systems

• NTFS (v1.2, v3.0, v3.1)
• FAT16
• FAT32
• Linux Ext2FS
• Linux Ext3FS
• Linux Swap
• HPFS

System Requirements

• CPU: Intel Pentium or compatible, 300MHz or higher processor
• RAM: 256 MB or greater recommended
• Disk space: 100 Mb
• Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher

Which Online Backup Service Is Best?

Bob Rankin has a post on Which Online Backup Service Is Best?.

Bob covers Carbonite, Mozy and iDrive as 3 of the biggest/most heavily advertised services.

Windows SteadyState from Microsoft

Windows SteadyState is a Microsoft freeware product which returns your computer to the same condition as it was before the last user.

Got pranksters around?  Someone who downloads who knows what?

“Windows SteadyState can return your family computer and hard disk to the condition it was before your children changed it. You just restart your computer.”

SpiderOak: Online Data Backup & Storage

MakeUseOf has a post about SpiderOak a Secure Online Data Backup & Storage service.

“SpiderOak is a secure online data backup, sync, sharing, remote access and storage tool. It is easy to use and lets you upload your files and access them from any Internet-connected device. It works quietly in the background and automatically backups and syncs your data across multiple computers and has a versioning system, which lets you rollback to previous versions of a stored file and access deleted files

It claims to have up to 15 times faster upload rate due to its compression and de-duplication technology. It’s fault tolerant design protects your data against any unforeseen events such as a network timeout, power outage and possible human errors.”

TechBite: Back up your Registry

TechBite has a post on how to Back up your Registry.

Blogger Steve Bass prefers “Emergency Recovery Utility NT. Affectionately known as ERUNT, it’s a free tool that automatically backs up your Registry and allows you to restore it. And despite its name, it works with Windows XP and Vista, including 64-bit editions.”

Backup your registry in Windows XP

Internet Fixes has a post on how to Backup your registry in Windows XP..

This is a vital first step before changing anything in the Registry or using any kind of registry cleaner.

Five Best Free System Restore/Disk imagers

Lifehacker has their Five Best Free System Restore Tools – Disk imagers.

You can find freeware to image your XP/Vista system in here somewhere.

Saving data from a bad hard drive

Internet Fixes has a post on how to save your data when a hard drive dies.

Step-by-step instructions and downloads for various brands.  This is something to try before you resort to an expensive commercial outfit to do a recovery for you.

13 Great Free Backup Programs for Windows, Mac, and Linux

Download Squad has 13 Great Free Backup Programs for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Pick your operating system and find a backup program for it — and use it!

Download Back In Time 0.9.26 for Linux

Back In Time 0.9.26 is is a simple backup system for Linux (Gnome & KDE4).

Two GUI available: Gnome and KDE 4 (>= 4.1).

Available on Softpedia.  Freeware for Linux.

MailStore: Email Archive and Backup free

MailStore is the Email Archive and Backup for a variety of email programs.

It handles:
* Microsoft Outlook 2000, XP, 2003 and 2007
* Microsoft Outlook Express and Windows Mail
* Microsoft Exchange Server Mailboxes
* Mozilla Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
* POP3 and IMAP (including webmail services such as Gmail and Yahoo)
* .eml and other files

Freeware. Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista.

Clonezilla will crush your drive cloning chores

Clonezilla is a freeware program to “clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS.”

It is intended to be comparable to programs like Norton Ghost and Partition Image.

It “can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.”  For “ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS” file systems it can save only the used blocks (so you’re not “saving” blank space, and can save to a smaller hard drive).

You can run the single version from CD/DVD/USB flash drive.

Slipstream Service Pack 1 into your Vista disc

Slipstream Service Pack 1 into your Vista disc refers to creating a recovery disc for Vista that includes Service Pack 1 (SP1) in case you need to install or reinstall Vista on your computer.

Slipstreaming Windows XP (SP3)

Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 3 (SP3) means creating a recovery disc with all the Windows XP updates and service packs up through Service Pack 3 (SP3), just in case you need to reinstall Windows XP.

Paul Thurrott is considered an expert on Windows and has an up-to-date manual for this process.

KLS Backup to backup your email

KLS Backup 2008 is an easy backup program for Windows Mail/Outlook Express/Thunderbird and even Firefox profiles and email.

Freeware.  Windows 2000/XP/Vista.

Copy your Outlook Express email files to a backup folder

Internet Fixes has instructions on how to Copy Outlook Express Mail Files to a Backup Folder.

Email programs tend to bury files in odd places, so here’s how to track them down if you’re using Microsoft Outlook Express.

Backup the Vista Registry

Internet Fixes has instructions on how to Backup the Vista Registry.

Before you change anything in a Windows system registry, back it up!

Free Remote/Online Backup : Cucku Backup

Cucku Backup — okay, what are the odds that your computer AND your relatives/friends/second computer will BOTH go crash and lose all your data at the same time?

Pretty slim, so if you use this free online service recommended by ZDNet, you can send a backup of any size to another computer as your backup.