Comodo Backup is a backup and restore utility for Windows. It is absolutely free for non-commercial use. The application allows you to back your computer up in a variety of ways. You can either backup your entire hard drive and all its partitions, for example. That is the most complete backup you can make and all your user files, data, configuration files, etc will be copied to an external source. By external source I mean to another hard drive, memory drive, DVD, etc. Now, the application itself does not have a DVD burning engine, but it does support Network and FTP uploads. It even has an option to upload your back-ups to the COMODO Online Storage servers, but at a price. The backup process takes the form of a multi-step wizard. First you select what to back up and then how to back it up, to finish up with the destination location. You can compress your backups and even encrypt them with AES algorithms. Compression usually takes a lot of time. Graphically, Comodo Backup does a great job of keeping it simple and to the point. The instructions are clear and following steps is the best way of achieving simplicity. It is also a very complete application, since it allows you to back-up different parts of your computer (registry, user settings, messenger accounts, and even e-mail clients), it also allows you to compress and encrypt those backups and, finally, you can restore them at any time or schedule new backups. Version 2.11 brings a lot of new functionality. The most notable improvement in my opinion is support for virtual drives and the pause and resume buttons during backups.
v2.0 [Jul 30, 2009]
* Software now features command line and scripting support
* 'Synchronized copy mode' now provides real time backups by copying a file to backup immediately after the used has saved a new version
* Auto-click finish / Auto-close for GUI when running scheduled backup
* 'Silent' scheduled backup – now possible to specify that scheduled backups run in the background without the GUI popping up
* Service mode scheduled backups run silently even when user is logged off
* Now possible to schedule a backup to run when computer is in 'idle' status
* Now possible to specify a delay before 'At Logon' scheduled backup tasks are run. This helps ensure smooth operation of the software by avoiding the typically excessive resource usage and process congestion immediately after Windows startup
* Added a 'Missed schedules' manager – user can specify actions to be taken in the event that a scheduled backup did not take place
* Added 'last run status' column for scheduled backups list
* Added resource usage information for disk/ network/ FTP connection/ CPU
* Network drives and virtual drives can now be selected as backup destinations
* Added the ability to search text within a backup (.cbu) file so users can confirm it contains the data they need before committing to a restore operation
* Added ability to pause and resume a backup during operation
