Handy Backup Review

Here's the thing. I have this fear that my hard drive will crash and I will lose everything on it. It has happened 3 times before and each time it happened I wanted to vomit. It's not all of the programs that were on the PC. It was the personal things like all of the digital pictures and downloaded MP3's (let me just say that re-downloading over 300 songs is a major pain in the @$$...I wish it on no one).

The one way to cure this, I thought was to go out and get another hard drive. So I did. Now for the problem. I didn't want to recopy everything from one hard drive to another everytime that I added more things to my master drive. Not to mention that any complete backup that you do takes up more than one cd-r.

I recently started to look for programs that I thought might be better than the stock program that comes with Microsoft Windows XP (or any Microsoft OS for that matter). I came across Handy Backup and it sounded decent so I downloaded the trial just to see what it could do. I only wanted to use this program to make cd-r backups of my hard drive...nothing else. That is all I used this program for.

I went ahead and made the backup, which took some time. Once it was done I saved it and, with a feature that is actually very good, compressed the backup file into a .zip file. I had no problem fitting it onto a disk. That little feature actually made me very happy. Instead of using 2 programs (the stock backup program on XP and WinZip to compress the file) I was able to just use one to do it all.

Handy Backup is a good program if you want convenience. Except for the fact that you can backup and compress the large file to fit onto one cd-r, there really is nothing shiny about this program. If you can live without convenience, go with the basic Windows OS backup program and WinZip to compress it.