I’ve been looking for some backup apps lately… starting to worry about that 60 gig Lightroom catalog sitting un-backed up on my local drive. And I even have a NAS to boot, which I’m not really using for anything.

First thing I tried was a trial version of SyncBackSE. While I see a lot of people hailing this as a backup tool, it really is just a sync’ing too.. kind of an rsync on steroids. It’s pretty good at what it does, but I was disappointed in its usefulness to do backup.. it doesn’t support Vista’s “previous versions” UI, and it has a clumsy way of restoring previous versions of individual files. The whole notion of previous versions of a file seems hacked on top of a synchronization engine.

Then I found SyncToy 2.0, which really is a just a Sync’ing tool, and doesn’t try to be much more. But it seems to work pretty damn well, and it’s free. No reason to pay for SyncBackSE if I’m only need it to sync files anyways. SyncBackSE has an interesting “Sync to FTP” feature, but I don’t really need that, and besides, it’s too slow to use over a cable modem connection for 60GB.

So now I have a weekly sync operation that will Sync my Lightroom Catalog folder a folder on my NAS. Pretty easy to set up, and seems pretty reliable and fast so far. And for bonus points, they even have a 64bit version.

By the way, why is Vista’s built in backup so lame? You can’t even specify individual folders. Nice try guys, but that’s just retarded.