Personal Backup

© 2012, J. Rathlev, IEAP, Kiel University

Version 5.2.0.3

Version 4.5.5.1
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Awards:

  • Personal Backup has been nominated by softwareload.de as Software of the Year in its Freeware section three times (2009 - 2011).
  • Editor's Pick Award and 100% Clean Award at software.informer

 

More download links:


New in Version 5.2

New in Version 5.1

Release notes (German only)

From Version 5.0 Personal Backup has been created using the IDE of Delphi 2009 which has full Unicode support and overcomes the ANSI (ISO-8859) filenames limitations on copying files. Also pathlengths may be longer than 260 characters.

The most important enhancements:

Note: Windows 98/ME are no longer supported.

The program package contains the following additional tools:

The program at a glance

Personal Backup is a program for saving personal data to any destination folder. This folder may be located on a local fixed or removable drive, on a Windows network server or on an FTP server. It runs under Windows 7 (32- & 64-bit), Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003/2008.
You can configure and store as many backup tasks as you wish. The selection of the files to be backed up is made on a by-folder basis. All subfolders are included automatically, but the user can exclude or include any subdirectories from or in the backup by selection or by filter. Additional criteria are the selection by file type, file age and/or file name filter.
At the destination folder the original drives (C:, D:, etc.) appear as subdirectories named LwC, LwD, etc. The original directory structure remains unchanged beneath these folders. All files may be compressed in gzip, either in toto or separated by subfolders as zip files. Optionally all data can be AES algorythm-encrypted.
Performing the backup can be done manually or automatically. During the backup the program checks whether the file to be saved is newer than one already backed up. Only files with newer timestamps are saved. An alternate criteria is the archive bit of the files.
Automatic backup can be started on logon, at a selectable time of day, on logoff or on shutdown. You can make scheduled backups with destination paths changing daily or weekly.
For individual schedules it is easy to start a backup using the Windows Task Scheduler and the command line options of the program.

Note: Personal Backup cannot be used to save and restore system files.

Anfang The functions in detail:

Download Windows setup:

Version 5.2.0.3 released 2012-01-25

from server at Kiel University from rathlev-home.de (6.48 MB)
(MD5 Checksum: e5fd1c009d5bc5d3bdf0365860d6c040)
Update as zip file
Older versions

More Information

Languages: German, English

Translations:

Further information

Compressing as gzip

The existing standard for the gzip format (RFC1952 of 1996) calls for the filename to be stored in the file header using the ISO-8859-1 character set. I could not find any recommendations as to how to handle Unicode filenames.

The current Linux version of the program gzip used for creating and reading gz archives differs from the above standard and stores filenames in UTF-8 format. The OS byte in the header is set to 3 (Unix).

Until now, Personal Backup has set this byte to 0 (FAT) and saved the filename per ISO-8859-1. To be compatible with previous versions and also to support Unicode, two variants are used in Version 5:

Hence the problem arises that other programs (such as WinZip or WinRar) will correctly detect the stored filename only with the first variant. This has, however, no effect on the unpacking of the files.

It would of course be better to use the unused bit 5 of the FLG byte as a criteria for the coding of the filename. The current zip format does it in this way (see below).

Creating zip archives

The current zip format specification version: 6.3.2 dated September 2007 defines how Unicode filenames are to be processed: if bit 11 of the "general purpose bit flag" is set, filename and comment are in UTF-8 coding. Personal Backup uses this convention. Unfortunately not all file-compression programs currently support this new format. Among those that do are WinZip Version 12 and WinRar Version 3.80, whereas Windows Explorer does not yet support the new format even under Windows 7.

Passwords

All passwords for FTP, for SMTP and AES encryption must be coded per ISO-8859-1.

Length of file paths

For filenames (inc. path), the 260-character limitation still applies to certain Windows versions (more info). This limitation appears no longer to apply first of all under Windows 7. Under older operating systems, e.g. XP, all applications using Windows shell components, such as Explorer, cannot process longer file paths.
Everywhere where Personal Backup refers to shell components (e.g. in a directory- or file-selection dialog), the path length limitation applies even for Version 5 except with Windows 7.
Internally, the program uses UNC paths (e.g. when copying files) which may have a maximum length of about 32000 characters. With Version 5 it is therefore possible to backup, restore and delete files with paths exceeding the above limit, even when most file managers (including Windows Explorer) will fail on scanning such a directory tree. One file manager that supports long filenames is Total Commander Version 7.5 .


Version 4.5

Version 4.5 works with all current Windows systems and Windows 98/ME. It supports only the West European character set (ISO 8859) and pathnames up to 260 characters.

Note: There will be no further development of this version! Version 5.1 is recommended for use with current operating systems.

Download Windows setup - Version 4.5.5.1 released 2011-04-15

from server at Kiel University from rathlev-home.de (5.54 MB)
Update as zip file

More Information


Utilities

This package contains programs useful for automating backup processes and to rescue data from damaged zip archives.

Downloads

All utilities WinMerge-Plugin BartPE plugin

Many thanks to Jim Scharfenberg Jones for proofreading my English


Last modified: 2012-01-25, J. Rathlev Visitors since 2007-02-09: