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Favorite Backup Software - SecondCopy

One of my favorite software applications is SecondCopy, from a local Fairfax, Virginia software developer. It is not only useful but perhaps one of the most well designed user interfaces to backup or mirroring software I have seen. Strike that. It is one of the most easy to use, easy to comprehend interfaces I have ever encountered in software. Moreover, it does one vital thing every application for backup and copy should do: clearly tell the user in plain language what it is going to do before it does it. SecondCopy, when creating a profile, tells you exactly what files will be affected and where the source and destination will be located in very clear and complete language.

Some of my favorite things about SecondCopy:

* Only copies what is new or has changed.
* Can generate a report of all files to be copied or deleted on source and destination disks before copying.
* Easy to use with clear explanations of what a copy operation will do. Creates a warning tailored to your choices, explaining and warning about exactly what it will do.
* Save profiles for each copy operation, can be scheduled.
* Only copies files, does not compress or "backup" files, so there is no danger of a backup you cannot restore.
* It can create multiple versions of files by saving files to an archive before deleting them.
* It can detect when a drive starts up.

It does a whole lot of other cool things. I've used it for several years, and it is reliable.

An interesting idea is to use a USB drive as temporary backup while working with important documents if you do not want to keep an external drive powered up. When I am coding and just do not want to start again, I sometimes keep the external HD on with SecondCopy backing up the source every fifteen minutes. I doubt a drive would fail that quickly without warning, but it's nice to be safe. Of course, if you have your backup and main drives running at the same time a power surge could take them both out, which makes a third drive a good idea. As far as I know, SecondCopy works with _any_ drive it can access.

www.secondcopy.com

It's for Windows only unfortunately. I'd love to have as good an interface on many Windows or Linux applications.
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