I am a fan of continuous data protection (CDP). Sooner or later, I think, all backup programs will support it. Most of the specialized CDP tools are quite expensive though. I stumbled upon Autobackup2, an easy-to-use CDP program that only costs 20 dollars.

The description on the product homepage doesn’t mention the term “CDP”. It seems that ARSoftware, the vendor of Autbackup2, is not aware that “CDP” is the most often used buzzword of backup software vendors these days.

Of course, Autobackup2 can’t be compared with sophisticated CDP tools. It is really a very simple tool. Installation and configuration are quite easy. You only have to configure the source and the corresponding destination folders and then start synchronisation. Like other CDP tools, Autobackup2 watches all activity in the source folder. As soon as there’s any change in file, it creates automatically a new backup of the file.

The time interval the software waits until the synchronisation starts and the number of different copies it will keep of a file can be specified. The default setting is one minute and five files. Autobackup2 can also remove backups automatically, if the corresponding source file was deleted.

To restore a file, you have to use Windows Explorer. As the backed-up files have different names than the originals, you have to rename the file after restoring it. This can be quite time consuming, if you have to restore many files. You can use a tool like the Bulk Name Utility for this.

As many other CDP tools, Autobackup2 is not for disaster recovery anyway. Its main purpose is to save different versions of a file. For this, the backup folder can be even on the same computer. If you want to synchronize it to a network folder, you have to map a share to a driver letter first.

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