Backy is a simple and free open-source solution for creating and maintaining backups. It’s very easy to use and multi-platform.
Backy allows you to create a backup of either a folder or an entire drive. Then, whenever your source content changes you can simply update your previous backup.
Backy’s graphical user interface is very intuitive even for beginners.
To create a backup, you need to specify the location where the content to be backed up is stored as well as the location where the backup will be created.
Then uncheck the Synchronize only checkbox in order to create a fresh backup.
Finally, click on the Backup button to begin the backup process and wait until it completes.
If you already have done a backup of the selected source location, you can synchronize it with the most recent changes of the latter without having to re-create an another backup which can become very disk space-consuming.
Backy will compare all the items in the source and the target backup locations and copy only those that had been changed since the last backup. You can choose between two comparison criterions. Either the most recent version or the biggest (in terms of file size) version of an item will be kept.
Moreover, you can define whether the files which exists in the target backup location should be preserved or deleted if they no longer exist in the source backup location. By default, such files are deleted. You can avoid it by ticking the Keep obsolete file(s) checkbox.
To begin the backup process, click on the Backup button.
In the case you want to abort a backup which is still in progress you can do so by clicking on the Abort button. You will be prompted to confirm your choice. Click Yes if you are sure you want to abort the backup.
Please note that the backup process won’t be stopped immediately! You’ll have to wait until the application has finished processing the current item.
In order to change the display language of the application, go to the Preferences dialog through the main menu or by pressing Shift+Ctrl+P, select the desired language from the list and click on the Apply button.
The Preferences dialog allows you to set manually the maximal value of copy buffer size. This must not exceed your computer’s RAM size which is displayed in the Backy’s Preferences dialog. As setting a wrong value can make the application to crash or harm your system, you’re strongly advised to NOT to change this value unless you know exactly what you are doing!