Backup procedure How to backup your files.

     Step by Step Instructions:

1. Select "Backup" Option and click the Next button.
   
   
2. Create or Edit Backup Set

        123Backup uses a Backup Set to process backup. At first time you have to Create a New Backup Set and later you can use it for further backups. That's why you have to:

   • Create a New Backup Set.
     

          Enter a brief description of the Backup Set. You can also select a template for that Backup Set. It means that 123Backup will copy properties from the template to the New Backup Set. When you are done with this procedure press "Next".
     
     

   • Use existing Backup Set
     

          Double click on a Backup Set in the list to change its properties.
     
          At this point you might want to proceed backup without accessing the other properties of a Backup Set. To do this, just click right button of mouse on the selected Backup Set and choose one of following commands:
     
     

     • Delete Backup Set
     • Files to Backup
     • Run Incremental Backup
     • Run Full Backup
     • Show Backup Logs
     • Create Wondows shortcut for Backup Set

3. Files to backup

        In the left part of the dialog box, you see the tree of folders of all your disks and all keys from your registry. Each item contains a box indicating its' status. To include or exclude files and folders to/from backup, you should check or uncheck these boxes. Files and folders with red tick will be included into backup. You can determine the meanings of those boxes by clicking ? button. To preview a list of the selected files and folders, press "Show list of files to backup" button.

4. Backup storage

        This page allows you to specify a backup storage (i.e. Where backup files will be stored). You can select one of follow options:

   • Zip archive - As a result you'll have a standard ZIP file on your hard disk. It's not good decision, because reliability of such backup is not very good: if your hard disk is crashed you will lose everything. You can use this option if you store Backup archive on other hard disk than source files.
     
     

   • Removable or Hard disk - Use this option if you want store Backup archives on HDD/CD-R/CD-RW/DVD/ZIP or other removable disks. When you are backing on CD-R, 123Backup requires a drive-letter access to the drive, which has to be provided by another program such as Adaptec's DirectCD, CeQuadrat PacketCD or InstantWrite. One way to tell if you can backup to your CD-R drive, is the device appears in your Windows Explorer as a drive letter (i.e. the drive has been mapped) and you can use it for basic file copying and storage.

     When 123Backup backs up on Removable disk, instead of making one backup archive per one disk, it makes a few backup archives, each of them has size about 10MB. It does so, because each of archives self-independent and can be restored if some of other archives are corrupted due media fault. It makes backup more reliable and reduces time of backup session. When current removable disk is filled, 123Backup asks for a new disk.
     
     

   • FTP Server - Use this option if you want to store backup archives on your FTP account of any standard FTP Server. 123Backup sends and downloads backup archives to FTP Server without using any external software!

     You can specify a secondary backup server that will be used in case the primary is down. To do that you have to specify all server's names separated by semicolon (e.g. primary.server.com;secondary.server.com). The secondary server will be used only if Software can't login to the primary server. 123Backup does not restore files from the secondary server. That's why you have to resend all backup archives to the primary backup server when it's up again.

     
     
        Also you can select an encryption key to encrypt backup archives. Go to Program Options to generate Encryption keys.

5. Backup of open files

        During backup process 123Backup tries to prevent writing operations to the backed at this moment file.  To achieve it 123Backup locks file (but accept read operations) before backup. All works fine if the file was not opening by other application.  But many office programs, like Microsoft Word, lock files themselves.  Moreover, some programs, like e-mail clients (Microsoft Outlook), work 24 hours in day and keep files opened all time. At this page 123Backup allows you configure special driver that is used by 123Backup to backup open files. more...
   
   NOTE: Driver can work only on Windows NT 4.0/2000/XP and Without registration you can't backup opened files with size more than 1MB!.

6. Scheduling

        This page allows you to select 2 options:

   • Run this type of Backup immediately - Here you can select how backup will be performed right now: backup all source files; backup only new or changed files; do not process backup (only save Backup Set).
     
     
   • Run backup of this Backup Set periodically (Scheduler properties) - You needn't run backup every time manually and can set period between backups. 123Backup Scheduler will automatically perform incremental backups. Select how often you want perform backups (every day/week/month and time to perform it).
     
     
        Press "Next" button to start backup process.