GFI Backup: Home Edition

I started using a new product this week at my parents house for backup, and I have to say its pretty cool. I’m talking about GFI Backup: Home Edition. One of my co-workers mentioned it after I said I was looking for a cheap backup software that could push to an FTP server.

Basically my goal was to backup all of mom’s pictures securely to an off-site location along with other important docs and emails. The off-site location I had chosen was a linux FTP server VM that is installed on the same cluster as the VM that hosts my blog.

I wont bore you with the generic program installation details, I will just say it’s very easy to install. After installation it has a very nice and easy to use interface. Setting up a job is done very easily:

From the home screen all I needed to do was click “Backup”.

That will start a backup wizard which has about 5 steps:

The first is to name your backup, the archive that it will create and some other basic information.

Second we select the files we need to backup.

Then we select the destination for the backup archive. Here we have several options which include everything from a USB stick to an FTP server. Perfect for what I want to do!

Next we have the ability to set some options. Here we get to pick if we want archive encryption, and zip compression levels. Perfect for a backup that is going offsite to an FTP server.

Then the only thing left is to setup the backup schedule and we are good to go. (this is a screenshot off their website as it looks like I forgot to take one of this screen 🙂

We also have the ability to email us when there are problems, but I left this stuff all at the defaults since it’s just a home backup.

 

Right now mom has a minimal amount of pictures on her computer because she is afraid of losing them and has always just bought new SD cards when the last is full. So right now there is only about 550MB that I’m backing up, but I figured I might have some problems over their 256Kbps upload rate. I scheduled the job at midnight, and it was done uploading the second night be 4am, so not too bad. Notice I said the second night…. this is because the first night the backup failed, which looked like it was due to a VSS error. To check on your backups its pretty easy to. From the home screen click on “My Tasks” and then in the top bar there is a button that says “View Log”, which will give you this dialog box. Here you can see if the jobs failed or succeeded.

 

I’ve only had this installed a few days, but things are looking good so far.

 

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