For years, I slacked on having a backup process at all and got burned by it a couple of times. Becoming a dad has meant I’ve taken thousands of pictures of the little one and shot a fair amount of video all the while continuing to rip what has become a reasonably sized (i.e., I can’t think of having to re-rip it) collection of CDs and so on. It seemed long overdue to have a backup system in place, so I decided to address that.

I started searching for backup software and found that I was in between the two common scenarios: enterprise and home users. The former was by no means what I needed while the latter was not enough. We have eight permanent computers in our house and it’s sometimes ten (when we bring our work laptops home). I run a full domain and have a dedicated server for it which is also where I store all of our need-to-backup data (i.e., photos, video, music, products, documents, etc.). The problem I found with most home (i.e., personal) backup software was that they were primarily targeting single machine backups where they’d save you if your machine happened to die for whatever reason. They also seemed to not like network shares as either sources or targets during the backup process.

After a few months of trying different products and just growing more and more frustrated, I’ve finally found one that has been humming along for three weeks now without a single problem. It’s called Second Copy. It does exactly what I wanted: makes an exact copy of the files I want backed up on an external drive, is smart about copying only files that have changed since the last backup, and is easy to schedule. The other nice thing is that it’s about half the price of the other software packages I bought which proved to be a waste of money (in my case). It did teach me though to take advantage of the trial versions offered by the various vendors instead of just believing what I read on their site.