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Backing up your computer is one of the most important file management tasks you should be performing on a regular basis. Because if you do not back up your important files and your computer crashes, you may lose a lot of your personal data.
There are many ways to back up your computer. Some people like to do system image backups that back up the operating system, applications and your files. The problem with this is that when you need to restore your backup, you are reverting your entire computer back to the date and time that the backup was made. Some of the better apps will allow you to mount your backup so you can restore specific files as needed. Other people may even go as far as cloning their entire hard drive which is similar to a system image backup but doesn’t save the backup as a backup image file. What you should be doing on a regular basis is a file and folder level backup. In this article, we will be showing you how to backup & restore files and folders for free with FBackup.
The FBackup software comes in two versions. There is a free version as well as a professional version with additional features that costs around $40. You can download either version from their website. We will be using the free version for our demonstration.
After you install and run the FBackup software, you will be shown a getting started screen where you can start a backup or find information about how to do the backups. You can also click the Close button to be taken to the main FBackup interface.
You will spend most of your time in the Jobs tab when using FBackup since that is where you can create, run and restore files and folders on your computer. The first time you run FBackup, you will not see too much until you create your first backup job. You will also notice how many of the options such as delete, duplicate, create shortcut, destination folder and refresh are greyed out. This is because these options are meant to be applied to existing backup jobs and if you do not have any, you will not be able to use them.
Creating a Backup Job with FBackup
To create a backup job for your files and folders, you will need to click on the New button on the toolbar. You will be shown the easy mode that does not give you as much control over your backups but might be all you need to create your back jobs.
We will be using the advanced wizard for our backup job which can be accessed by clicking on the Advanced mode button. As you can see in the image below, you have many more options and settings that can be configured using the advanced mode.
On the General tab, you can give your job a name and description. We will call ours Documents Backup since we will be backup up the Windows Documents folder. You can also change the icon that is used for the job to make it better match the type of files you are backing up.
Next, you will need to choose a destination for your backup. As you can see, there are several options as to where you can have your files and folders backed up to. There are even cloud options such as Google Drive and Dropbox.
We will be using the local disk option to backup our files to a secondary hard drive inside of the computer. You may want to consider using an external disk for your backups so you can keep them separate from the computer itself just in case something happens to it. Ours will be going on the E drive in a folder called Backup.
We will now choose the Documents folder for our source since that is what we intend to back up with this new job. Once you choose a folder, you can uncheck any files or folders within that folder that you do not want to have backed up. You can also add additional files and folders from other locations as needed.
The Filters section can be used to include or exclude certain types of files. For example, if you did not want to backup any text files you can add *.txt as an exclusion. By Default, FBackup does not backup temporary files unless you uncheck to boxes next to the settings.
The free version of FBackup will allow you to create a full backup where everything gets backed up each time as well as a mirror backup which is the same as a full backup, but the backup does not get compressed into a zip file. The smart, differential and incremental backup types are only available with the professional version of the software.
If you click on Storage, you can see the prefix that will be used for your backup job. This will make more sense once we show you the backup files after the job is run. You can edit this prefix as needed to help it make more sense. The default setting is 1_C.zip.
The Compression section has two options, encryption and split. If you want to add a password to your backup file so nobody can restore it without knowing it, you can do so from here. If you are going to have large backup files, you can have FBackup split them into multiple files so you can copy them to another location.
The main thing you may want to change from the Advanced section is whether or not FBackup will test your backup file after the backup job has run. This will make the backup take a little longer but will help ensure that it has run correctly.
If you plan on running this backup job on a regular basis, you can schedule it to run automatically. To do so, click on the Add button and choose the date, time and how often you want the job to run. Just be aware that your computer will need to be on at the time the scheduled job is set to run.
The Email setting is a paid feature that allows you to receive email notification when a backup job has completed successfully or has failed.
Now that our backup job has been configured, we can go back to the Jobs tab and click on Backup to start the job. The time it takes for the job to finish will vary on how many files and folders you are backing up as well as their size.
The image below shows the backup files in our backup location. As you can see, there is a folder called Documents and also a Documents.fkc file. The .fkc file is the backup catalog file and does not contain your backed up files.
Now when we open the Documents folder, we will see the 1_C.Zip file that we saw when looking at the storage settings when configuring the backup job. This zip file contains all of the files and folders from the backup.
Restoring a Backup Job with FBackup
Restoring files and folder with FBackup is a very easy process. From the Jobs tab, simply click on the backup job you want to restore and click on the Restore button.
Once the restore wizard starts, you can choose to have your files restored to their original location or a different location. If your files are missing from the original location, you would want to choose the first option. If they are not, you can still restore them to the original location but will need to decide how you want them to be restored by choosing an option under the How do you want to restore section. Be careful when using this option to be sure you restore the proper version of the files.
Another option is to use the Choose another location choice. This will allow you to restore your files to a different location without affecting your original files. You can then go through these restored files and get the files that you need.
We will use this option and restore the Documents backup job to a folder on the E drive called Temp.
After the restore process has completed, we can now go to the Temp folder and see all of our documents and take action on them as needed.
One thing you may want to do when using FBackup is go to the File tab and then click on Options to see what types of settings you may want to change if any. Anything with a $ symbol next to it is part of the Professional version and not something you will be able to use.
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