Most of us don't back up our files nearly often enough. I'm not sure I like living on the edge--after all, one wrong move with a coffee cup or one misstep at the airport security line could lead to a laptop disaster. I'm not sure why I don't back up as much as I probably need to, but at least some of the reason is the inconvenience and intrusiveness of backup software.

I recently bought a new computer and needed to move a lot of customizations, programs, and data files to the new machine from the old one, which I would then reformat and wipe clean. I needed something that was, most important, reliable, as the original copies of the backed up files would no longer exist when I finished. I wanted a tool that didn't just try to copy everything from point A to B, but checked to see whether the file at the destination was different from the origin before wasting all that time copying and overwriting the very same files. Finally, it needed to be easy to customize and quickly run on a regular basis, to eliminate that final inconvenience issue.

Where I landed was on Microsoft's supremely understated, free utility, SyncToy. Version 2.1 has been around since 2009, but still works perfectly in both the oldest and newest versions of Windows. It's a Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 application, so you'll need to install that prerequisite before SyncToy, but once you do, it takes only seconds to install.

Everything in SyncToy is organized around Folder Pairs, which is just a shorthand way to indicate an origin location (which SyncToy calls the Left Folder) and destination location (which SyncToy calls the Right Folder) for the files you want to move around. I know why you need an origin and destination; I have no idea why SyncToy names those folders Left and Right, and not after their roles. It's not a deal breaker, but the use of relative directions for the names of the folder pair elements is a major conceptual gaffe.

SyncToy isn't perfect, especially not for the novice user who may need a lot of guidance to find the multitude of locations on the file system where you'd want to back up stored files. But for power users who know what they want, SyncToy delivers powerful file management in a puny, less-than-1.5MB package. So stop making excuses and back that stuff up before it's too late.

--Andrew Brandt