When the program first opens up, it is hard to be confused by it. The interface is quite easy to get around on. The program is really broken up into two major functions: backup and restore. There are two big buttons right at the top to determine what “mode” the program is in. When you’re in “backup mode”, you can create your “backup jobs”. Just hit the “create job” button and choose a name for the job. You can name the job anything you want, so if you’re creating a job to do a daily backup of your Outlook mail, you could call the job “Daily Outlook Backup” or something to that effect.

At this point, you press the next tab to choose the files you want to include in this backup job. When you do this, you will see a list of drives on your PC, as well as shortcuts to the User Data and System Settings on your machine. I am running Windows XP, so I saw options to backup the settings for each of the users on this PC, as well as system settings. Navigating this window is exactly like navigating Windows Explorer. To include a file or directory into your backup job, just check the box next to the file or directory. Each time you check off a directory or file, you will see the tally on the bottom of the screen update. This will tell you how large the resulting backup will be, the number of files in the backup, as well as the size of the compressed backup file. If you do not know the name of a file you wish to backup, you can take advantage of WinBackup’s built-in search function to find the file and add it to your backup job.

Once you have chosen the files you wish to include in your backup job, you go back to the main screen and you choose where you want the backup job to save the backup when the job is run. You can choose to put the backup onto any location on your PC, including directly onto a CD-R or CD-RW. Yes, WinBackup has the integrated ability to write directly to your CD recorder. This is convenient because you can create your backup jobs and record them to a removable media overnight, and you do not need to worry about interfacing with Nero or whatever other burning software you typically use.

For each backup job, you have some settings you can use:

• Do a full backup each time the job is run or update only the changes since the last backup


• If you choose to replace all files, you can choose to copy the existing backup to a different directory to keep it from being overwritten.


• You can exclude files with certain endings


• You can specify for certain windows processes to be shut down before the backup is run.


• You can split the backup into smaller file segments (useful if you want to span it acrosss multiple floppies)


• Compress the backup to save space


• Verify the backup to ensure exact file-for-file duplication

There are also settings having to do with CD recording and security. As for security, one can assign each backup a username and password and encrypt the backup using either 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption. This is great if you are recording backups of sensitive data or storing backups on an insecure medium of some kind.

Each job can be scheduled to run automatically at certain times. This happens to be one of my favorites features, for some reason. Just click “Schedule Backup” and a window will pop up allowing you full control over when the backup runs. The scheduling interface is quite intuitive, as you can see to the right. An overnight test confirmed that indeed it works as expected.