SaneThinking.com "Bax It! Latest news"

Bax It! Latest news

Bax It! is now available to download, released 14th May 2008.

This is no longer the home page for Bax It! as I have re arranged the site and now have a section for Bax It.

Go here for further news, other info about Bax It! and for upgrades ...

Bax It! Home Page

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 2008 Update. Bax It! 3 is still close to release. I am aiming to announce it's availability for free download here very soon and by that I am hoping it will be by the end of May.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

V3.0 is close to release. This is the cloning version. I didn't do a version 2.0 -- okay then why did I jump from 1.5 to 3.0? Well, V2.0 did happen briefly, but almost as soon as I started it I decided to make a bigger project out of Bax It!. Until V3.0 I had never considered, seriously, making a cloning program. I saw that as beyond my coding capabilities. But in a mad moment I changed my mind and decided to give it a go. Now a backup program is one thing; it's a fairly trivial bunch of coding really - mind you even a very simple program is often made into a horrendous monster (anyone heard of Fdisk? or Xcopy? at all). Anyway, I forget what advance V2.0 was but it didn't include cloning. So V2.0 was put aside pending my total and abject failure to be able to bring V3.0 into the light of day. Today though, 20th March 2008, after a couple of months of tearing my hair out, I have solved the problems and I now have a cloning program.

The reason I decided to give it a go in the first place was just for myself because I knew I was pushing my luck with my five year old laptop and my current cloning and backup combination programs were a real nuisance. Bax It! was fine. I used it often and it never fails to do a good job. But it wasn't capable of cloning and I knew when, and it really is when not if, my system failed that going back to my last clone would take me back a year (in terms of total Windows system state) and I didn't want to be that out of date with all my hard computer work.

That's a brief introduction to Bax It! version 3.0 and how it came about.

Now what can it do? Well, it backs up just like the previous version but, optionally, it will clone your system entirely and in the process it also defrags everything. Although it is useable - and I am using it for my own safety needs - I want to keep improving it, so although I am announcing it's existence here now, it will be some weeks, most likely, before I actually release it. You'll hear more here as the big day arrives.

The entries below relate to ealier versions of Bax It! and are probably not very useful to anyone now. Although, I see from reading it again (the first time since I wrote it) what V2.0 was all about. I had forgotten. So I didn't actually miss out V2.0 at all. Not that it matters now. Previous versions are no longer available but in the coming weeks I plan to make both a free version available and a pay for version. The pay for version will clone as well as backup, the free version will back up but won't clone. I think that's a fair deal. Apart from that they will be the same programs. I won't be spoiling the free version - it will still be a good program to use just like I use it every week or so.

V1.5 is the latest version I make available although if enough people show enough interest I am ready, more or less, to offer v2.0 which is the version I now use for my own backing up, a no-brainer activity that I generally do once per week. But v1.5 does the trick just fine so you don't have any need to upgrade. What does V2.0 do more than 1.5? It manages the backup as well as making the backup. V2.0 moves files that might normally be deleted but, just think, do you really want a backed up file to disappear from the backup just because it's gone from the source? No, you don't, not until you have ascertained that it has been deleted but not our of error!

So V2.0, as one thing it does, instead of mimicking the drive it is backing up by deleting backups that no longer seem to exist on the source drive, for example, it just moves them, just to be on the safe side. In fact that is all it does - it never deletes files, which, really is the only safe way to manage your backup.

If you are using a backup program that doesn't appreciate that subtlety then consider using Bax It! instead if you are not already using it.

On top of that V2 does some other management of your backup that makes it a doddle to recover from lost data and to delete wholesale without risking serious loss - it's all about very careful design and I use Bax It! for all my own personal backup so would I use it if I had my doubts about it or didn't have full confidence in it? After all I wrote the program because existing backup programs let me down.

In case you are reading this and you don't yet do backups or rarely do them, let me say that already I have resorted to my backup several times since using Bax It! for my own use - it has saved me a lot of work several times even though I haven't had a hard drive failure or any failure for that matter, it's just been a case of human error and Bax It! has made it possible for me to recover from several such errors. So don't put it off any longer, download it and use it before learn the hard way and wish that you had used it.

25th May 2007
Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com

You may like to know that there may be other articles, similar to this one, here, in this category:
Free Programs

If no earlier date is shown above then this page began life on 07.04.2007. It was most recently updated, improved, tarted-up, sexed-up, modified, polished, or just imperceptably re-edited, due, most likely, to compulsive and unrestrained perfectionism, influenced quite possibly by a minor degree of pedantic extremism, on 27.05.2008.