In a previous post (on my personal blog) about preparing for your Windows 7 installation, I briefly discussed backups. Aside from the obvious reason of having a copy of your important stuff stored safely, backups have another benefit;  they give you the confidence to work on your computer yourself -- not having to rely on your friend, office mate or the 14yr old neighbour.But making good backups, backups that are easy to use and restore can be a challenge. Especially the restore part -- without a good restore, the backup is worthless. And if making and restoring your backups isn't easy, odds are that you won't do it, even though you know you should. Which begs the question; how can I easily back up my system?This is where the home-grown Canadian-developed Clickfree Automatic Backup comes in. It's a hardware / software solution that makes painless and effective backups on PC's and Macs (sorry, no Linux version available at this time). It also will help you migrate your files to a new Windows OS.What it is

The unit I tested, a 250GB Clickfree C2 unit should be available now, and it's a pretty cool device.

Basically it's a USB hard drive, with some very slick automated backup software. To quote from the developer:

The Clickfree C2 is the next generation of the Award-Winning Clickfree Portable Backup drives, featuring Smart Automatic Backup features, a new all-in-one design with integrated USB cable, iPod music transfer, and advanced backup features including hardware-based encryption and email attachment extraction.

Whew, that's a lot for one sentence, and for one backup device, but it works, and that's what's important.

What I did
For my test, I backed up two home Windows XP boxes. All I had to do was plug the USB connector into a free USB port and the process started. If you have *autorun* disabled, you'll have to manually open the device (it looks like a USB drive to your system) and launch it manually.

Backing up files - moments after plugging in the drive

So, plug it in and the backup starts. Yes, it's really that simple.

What's going on
First, the software scans your computer looking for common file types; Photos, Music, E-Mail files, Text Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations, Artwork and Drawings, Videos, Favourite Websites, and other files. Once it identifies them, it copies files identified as 'documents' on to the backup device.

[for the advanced student]
If your home system includes mapped networked drives, say on a Network Attached Storage device or file server, a few simple tweaks in the Advanced panel will have you backing up data on those drives too. By default, the Clickfree C2 won't backup mapped network drives, but a trivial setting change will fix that right up.

What I thought
I noticed that the Clickfree C2 didn't copy all my files, just my data or document files that it knows about -- and it didn't copy application files. If you have a filetype that isn't detected in the initial backup you can add new filetypes to the backup settings, though there's already a rather extensive list built-in.



Appearances are deceiving
The software interface is deceptively clean and friendly, and that can easily lead you to believe that this is a fairly simple piece of software. That's not the case at all. Take a look at the Clickfree C2 user manual ; over 120 pages of gritty details on the backup process you really don't need to read, unless you want to get into those details. This impressed me -- the ability to do a backup without reading the manual .

Another nifty thing I like about this little unit; you can use it to transfer files from one system to another. The Clickfree software keeps track of the computers you back up with it. You can mix Mac and PC backups on the same device. In my case, I've backed up two different XP systems and am looking forward to restoring the files once I get the retail version of Windows 7 installed -- but in my test, backing up, moving, transfering and restoring files to the same or other systems worked as advertised.

And it was reasonably quick too...backing up my laptop (about 83GB of files) took only about a half hour.

A few other things this little puppy will do:
Copy / backup music and videos from iPhone / iPod devices
Password protect and encrypt your data
Schedule backups
Burn CDS or DVDs of the data you've backed up

What's the bottom line
I like it. It's small, somewhat stylish, and it works. I'm a fan of things that 'just work' and the Clickfree C2 excels at that. You plug it in and it works.

This is a new product from Clickfree - it started shipping November 2nd. You should be able to find it at most retailers or online.

The unit I tested, the 250GB C2 can be found for around $140. Well worth it for an easy and reliable backup system. Heh, it's the price of two new Xbox games