ShackUp - The Simple (and Free!) Backup Program

ShackUp is a simple, easy-to-use, and free backup program for Windows 2000/XP.  It doesn't have a lot of advanced features, but it does do two things that, as far as we know, no other programs do.

First, ShackUp can be set to pause for up to a full second while doing its backup. If you've ever tried to use a PC while it's backing up to a ZIP drive, you'll know why we implemented this. (By default, ShackUp does its backups as fast as possible, but the ability to have it pause - so that you can do your work - is there if you need it.)

Second - and this is the cool part - ShackUp solves the problem of forgetting to add new folders to the backup.  How does it do this?  Through the magic of...

Awards for ShackUp!

Automatic Monitoring

How many times has this happened to you? You install a backup program, laboriously specify the files you want to back up, and then forget about it, except to do your backups religiously. Then one day, you need to restore a file...

... only to discover - to your horror - that the file never got backed-up!  Why? Because it was created six months after you installed the backup software, and you forgot to tell the backup program to back it up - and nothing reminded you to! This is why ShackUp was created.

By putting ShackUp in your Startup group, you can have it continuously monitor your hard drives for changes. The moment you create a new file, or modify an existing one, ShackUp checks the list of folders you've already specified rules for (more on 'rules' later), and if you haven't dealt with this folder yet, displays a window so you can do so at that moment. No more, 'Oops, I renamed my Quicken folder last year, so I have no recent backups!'

But wait, there's more! Not only does ShackUp watch for new folders, you can also easily tell it to back up all the files of a given type in a folder. For example, you can tell it to back up all the '*.xls' files in the 'C:\Invoices' folder. That way, you'll be sure any new XLS files created in that folder will automatically get backed up!

Try ShackUp - it's Free!

Although no program can be all things to all users, ShackUp is unusually narrow in its focus; it lacks some features that other programs have.  So, to help prevent you from wasting your time downloading and trying a program that doesn't meet your needs, here's a list of what ShackUp doesn't do:

• No special support for tape drives. DVD drives, or FTP servers.  Pretty much all you can back up to is a floppy, Zip, or hard drive.
  
  
• Compression is done via the file system's built-in support for it, if any. This means you can optionally compress the backed up files, but only on drives that can do their own compression. So, for example, you can't compress files to floppy drives, but you can to hard drives running NTFS, and (of course) ZIP drives.
  
  
• Only a simple copy is done when backing up - there's no concept of versioning, or support for multiple backups (unless you do them manually).  This means that at any given moment - unless you use multiple disks - you have only one backup.
  
  
• There's no installation kit, because, frankly, it doesn't need one.  All you have to do is save it to your hard drive, and - here's the hard part - add a shortcut to it in your Startup group.  (If you have no idea what on Earth I'm talking about, then ShackUp probably isn't the backup program for you.)

Download ShackUp 1.0 Now!

Click here to download ShackUp 1.0!  The file is only 444 KB.  The on-line help file describes exactly how to install and set up the program.

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Last modified: January 06, 2005

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