I’ve found a new tool that helps significantly with the tiresome process of backing up your files. It’s called Synkron. I first heard of it from the productivity blog, When I Have Time. The post I just linked to has a much more in-depth writeup than I will go into here.

Synkron works on several operating systems. Hook up your external hard drive (if you don’t have one, get one). Then tell Synkron what directories to back up. I have two directires on my computer where I store my personal and business files–I simply tell Synkron to “clone” these two directories to my hard drive. Cloning will copy any new files to the hard drive directory as well as delete any files that aren’t in the directory being cloned. The first time I did this, I saved about 1GB space on my hard drive from deleting previously backed up files that I had deleted on my computer but were still on my hard drive.

One issue I’ve found is that if you have Firefox and other applications open on your computer, Skynron takes forever to finish it’s cloning–I’m talking several hours here. Yesterday I closed all applications on my computer before starting the cloning process and Synkron was done in 2 minutes flat.