Review: Second Copy 2000

Automatic backup? Kai Chandler reviews Second Copy 2000.

Product	Second Copy 2000
Company	Centered Systems
Web	www.centered.com
Price	$29.95
We like	Ease of use - does what is says
We don't like	No support for tape backup devices.
Rating	9/10
Requirements

We've written recently on the importance of backing up your vital data. For example, securing your AOL Personal Filing Cabinet and Organize directories. With the best will in the world, it can be a chore, all too often postponed until it's too late.

Here's a tool called Second Copy 2000 that should help make backups easier. Its mission is quite simple and it does it well. It copies files and directories from one place to another automatically.

Think for a moment about the benefits of this. You can easily synchronize files between desktop and laptop computers. You can combine copies of all your important files, regularly updated, onto a single directory. This can be backed up as part of your regular backup routine.

You can also use Second Copy to copy files directly to the CD, to a separate hard disk or even across a local area network to another device. Auto-dial and auto-login features let you back up files remotely to an office server although this was not tested as part of this review. Note that tape devices are not supported.

Second Copy 2000 runs in the background so you don't need to schedule it as a separate activity to be remembered.

Easy to use

The Express Setup option of Second Copy 2000 is dead easy to use. You just create profiles for files you want to copy. Each profile defines a source, destination, and how often the files should be copied. It only copies new and changed files so there's no additional overhead of copying unchanged files already in the target folder. You can even create a profile by dragging the source folder and dropping it onto a Second Copy window.

Keep a history

If you need to create a history of changes, for example to a word processing document, you can store up to 25 prior versions of the copy in the target folder.

Support for power users

Custom Setup has special options for power users. There are six ways to copy files, including Simple Copy, Exact Copy which deletes any files in the destination that are not in the original folder and Move.

You can also define files to include or exclude and compress the files as part of the copy operation. The compressed files can be password protected to guard against casual snoopers. Compression uses the industry standard PKZip 2.04g format which is compatible with Winzip.

Profiles can be categorised into different groups such as daily backups, weekly archives, or word processing documents. You can even use date parameters such as $date$ in the profile names, for example to create Daily Report - 20021022.zip and so on.

How it works

Second Copy runs in the background so once you have defined a profile it leaps into action at the specified time. You can copy at any virtually any frequency between every minute and 999 days, or on demand.

Second Copy then compares the date and time stamp of the source and destination files, and copies new and changed files. It logs all activities to file so you can see which files were copied and if there were any errors. It can only copy files not in use by other applications. If it tries to copy an open file, it alerts you to give you the option of closing that file.

To sum up, Second Copy 2000 is an excellent tool for unattended, automatic file copying.

 

Kai Chandler