IdleBackup Review

For the last four months I’ve been running IdleBackup on two of my computers. One of them is my server and the other is my primary computer. My server doesn’t see much action anymore, but a few months ago, I was making changes every few minutes and needed comprehensive backup. IdleBackup was there. My primary computer for doing school work and programming has constantly needed backups. IdleBackup has been there.

IdleBackup offers things that will make most people happy.

IdleBackup Window

• Simple Interface – Select Folders or Files or both. Then pick what drive you want then backup on and to finish, hit start and it’ll automatically backup from there.
• Idle Only – IdleBack only runs when you’ve been idle for 60 seconds. You can set it to wait for any amount of minutes (below 999). If you move the mouse while a backup is in progress, it’ll stop the process and wait again until you’ve been idle for 60 seconds. I backup everything every 360 minutes (4 hours).
• Normal Files Option – While it’s not always great to have your files be uncompressed on your backup drive, it’s certainly great to be able to view, open and copy files without having to extract them from a zip or other wise annoying archive.
• Small memory foot print – It doesn’t take much memory even though it’s always running. Consistantly, my IdleBackup runs at about seven megabytes.

IdleBackup is excellent in most respects. It does a great job at backuping just regular files. I’ve noticed errors come up when dealing with deeply nested folders and system files.

I backup my entire users folder on my C: drive. (like, C:\Users\Ryan\). You’d think it’d backup that without any problem, but it doesn’t. It will often return to me saying that files are either locked or the filepath may be too long. I understand the locking of files, but seriously, if a filepath is too long to copy somewhere else, how did it even come to exist? So in short, if you must backup files that are 25 directories deep, this may not be for you.

IdleBackup version 1.15b (download here) is out right now but it seems at this time, version 1.16 is going to come out soon. I couldn’t find what features or fixes are planned for 1.16, but I’m sure they’ll be good.