Cobian Backup

Cobian Backup is free, donation-supported backup software for Microsoft Windows. It is written in Delphi by Luis Cobian of Umeå University.

History

Cobian Backup was originally released in 2000. The program was later rewritten and released under version 7. The next version (version 8) was released in 2006. Its source code was later released under the Mozilla Public License in late January 2007. However, with version 9 the author of Cobian Backup decided to switch back to a completely closed source model. Older versions will remain Open Source forever, as the release of the program under the Mozilla Public License cannot be revoked.

Development and support by the original author has been discontinued with version 11.2.0.582 and the source code has since been sold off.

Features

Cobian Backup supports Unicode, FTP, compression (ZIP, SQX, 7z), encryption (including Blowfish, Rijndael, DES, RSA-Rijndael ), incremental and differential backup, for example a differential backup every night (which backs up user files that have changed since the last full backup) and a full backup every seventh night (backing up a full set of user files). Backups can be saved to CD, DVD, USB memory stick, a second hard drive (internal or external), etc. It supports long file names (32,000 characters) for all backup routines.

Backup

In information technology, a backup, or the process of backing up, refers to the copying and archiving of computer data so it may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. The verb form is to back up in two words, whereas the noun is backup.

Backups have two distinct purposes. The primary purpose is to recover data after its loss, be it by data deletion or corruption. Data loss can be a common experience of computer users; a 2008 survey found that 66% of respondents had lost files on their home PC. The secondary purpose of backups is to recover data from an earlier time, according to a user-defined data retention policy, typically configured within a backup application for how long copies of data are required. Though backups represent a simple form of disaster recovery, and should be part of any disaster recovery plan, backups by themselves should not be considered a complete disaster recovery plan. One reason for this is that not all backup systems are able to reconstitute a computer system or other complex configuration such as a computer cluster, active directory server, or database server by simply restoring data from a backup.