Affordable Continuous Data Protection

Instant Real Time Automatic Online Data Backup Software for Everyone!

Never forget to backup your files again! Active Backup is constantly online and saves you time by doing data backups for you.

Perfect solution for other programs that have poor "undo" features.

Helps you track and find out what changes you have made to documents.

How often do you lose important changes due to a machine crash, network problems or power cut?

Would you like the ability to restore to any previous version of your files without wasting valuable disk space?

Easy and clear install and setup screens - AJC Active Backup can be providing continous data protection for your files in 5 minutes

AJC Active Backup is an automatic archiving program that provides continuous data protection by being constantly online and instantly backs up data files and documents in real-time just seconds after you change (save) them on your PC and keeps multiple versions to undo.

Multiple versions of each file are kept in a compact archive giving unlimited undo capabilities and protection from costly mistakes or file corruption. This avoids reaching for last night’s backup, if you actually have one! AJC Active Backup also brings version control to the average computer user, or user who is too busy to worry about doing backups.

AJC Active Backup is ideal for programmers, journalists, documenters, in fact anyone who regularly changes typical office related files and documents throughout the day, and require better control of their files, and the peace of mind immediate backing up provides.

Ensuring your valuable files and documents are backed up regularly is a vital necessity, not just a "nice to have" !

Genuine Customer Testimonial: "At first glance I wondered why I would need such a piece of software. I already used AJC Dirsync, and when I was asked by AJC Software if I would like to try Active Backup I gave it a go. After I started using it I soon discovered its real potential. It saved me with a project I was working on in the summer when we had thunder storms causing power loss and my C: drive crashed right at the end of the day after tons of changes (and my scheduled DirSync backup had not yet occurred). I think the method of saving different versions of my files is really neat - I can see version differences and restore any fiel back to any point in time. Our programming team uses Visual SourceSafe, but like many programmers I don't "Check In" my changes until a program change is complete and tested. In this respect it really helps keep track of intermediate work - I regularly hit CTRL-S to save throughout the day, and have peace of mind knowing that Active Backup just archived a new version for me. Being able to add comments against versions is useful too. I also work with two other software packages that have NO UNDO feature atall!! How useless is that? But now Active Backup saves my life every time!" Alison Moore, Lincolnshire, UK

The AJC Software house seem to have done it again! Since its recent release (Dec 2004), I have reviewed AJC Active Backup and yet again it is a piece of well designed software added to the AJC arsenal of essential utilities that I now use every day to automatically backup files on my PC in real-time, whilst also retaining older versions of the same file in a compact archive.

"This is great for helping me automatically store different versions of my Word documents when I hit the Save button - without thinking - and yet it uses very little extra space!"

This is revolutionary software!

There are only a couple of other programs available currently that provide similar functionality, and I found them to be considerably more expensive, or with fewer features.

At my office I now have AJC Active Backup operating online silently during the day to constantly protect my work on my local computer, and then at the end of the day I also use AJC Directory Synchronizer to synchronize and backup my work to another networked computer, or my laptop (although Active Backup can archive to wherever you want - you don't have to use DirSync too, its just what I do). I have also taken to using Active Backup at home too. In practice I have found it works well with large files (several MBytes), and stores multiple file revisions with very little increase in the size of the data backup archive file.

Take a look at some of the main features of the program:-

AJC Active Backup sits quietly in the System Tray of your PC, continuously monitoring and archiving files as you work on them:-

System Tray Icon

= Backup is Offline. No files are being monitored for changes. = Backup is Online and monitoring files for changes. When a file is changed that matches the patterns and directories you entered, Online Data Backup will become Active and it will be processed. = Backup is Active. This means files have been selected for processing. When the file is saved the program will check for changes, and archive if necessary.

Each time you change a file and save it (even if this is by way of copying or moving files using Windows Explorer) the program will check to see what has changed. Only if the contents have changed since the last time it was archived will it prepare a copy of the changes in a compact data backup of the file.

This gives the following advantages:-

• If you make a mistake, you can easily go back to any previous version of the file.
• If you forget what you have done to a file, you can see a comparison with any previous version of that file.
• You have a complete history of how that file was altered over time.
• If a program you are using to edit a file, somehow corrupts the file, you can easily restore from the last saved version.

You choose the location for the Archives (e.g. to a different folder on the same disk, or better a second hard disk in your PC, or even a JAZ, ZIP or other fast external drive, or even a USB Memory stick). The backup archives are generally very small because they are (optionally) compressed and only the changes to each file are stored each time a new revision is added.

There is an automatic purge facility to reclaim disk space by stopping the archives from growing too large. Having this means that once set up,

AJC Active Backup is literally a "no-brainer" ! Install, set and forget. You might occasionally add a new file type or folder to monitor.

You control exactly which folders and file patterns it monitors online, so that excessive archiving is prevented. The program allows you to specify Include and Exclude file patterns.

You should be specific about the directories you want to monitor. These are directories where your work or important files are held. It is not a good idea to monitor your whole drive or temporary directories etc, e.g. don't just monitor C:\

For example you might only want to monitor for changes to MS Word documents (*.doc) and Excel spreadsheets (*.xls) in your My Documents folder, and changes you are making to Web Pages (e.g. *.html, *.asp, *.php, etc) in a Development folder.

The types of files I monitor are as follows;

• *.txt - i.e. simple text files
• *.doc;*.dot;*.xls;*.ppt;*.rtf - i.e. most MS Office documents
• *.htm;*.html;*.shtml;*.php;*.asp;*.css;*.dwt;*.lbi;*.cgi;*.js - i.e. all Web Page related files

AJC Active Backup is not really designed for working with very large or constantly active files like databases (although in some tests I performed I was using database and graphics files of between 30Mb and 50Mb perfectly ok) - the manual says if you do it might possibly slow your system down, but this depends on the power of your PC. Download the 30-day trial to be sure. If you do experience slowness with large files there is an option called Max file size to archive which is the maximum size, in KB, of files that you want to be archived. If you enter a value of zero then there will be no limit. Also, you choose whether the program is to Compress archives to reduce their size, and you can specify to exclude compression of certain types of files which don't compress well, e.g. *.zip or *.mdb.

Besides the Automatic Purge options, there are various other housekeeping Tools to manually purge archives to reduce their size, and to delete old online data backup Archives no longer required. You may need to do this because you have changed what directories and file patterns you are monitoring and you want to remove archives that are no longer relevant or to remove archives where the associated files no longer exist.

Again, sensible options are provided to assist with this. For instance to thin down the number of revisions held you can specify;

• a minimum number of revisions to be retained at any time
• for revisions older than X days to delete revisions leaving only one summary revision for each Hour, Day, Week, Month or Year
• to keep any revisions for which a Description has been entered
• to delete all revisions more than X days, weeks, months or years old

  All these options provide a self-moderating system.

  The Help and Wizards make understanding the program quick and easy.

Using Active Backup

When you install the program, a Setup Wizard guides you through the initial configuration. After that it is fully online and automatically providing continuous protection of your data!

Once installed, the status icon Menu is accessed by right-clicking on the status icon:-

There are choices to go Online or Offline and alter the Options, which include the file patterns etc. Archive Existing Files checks that your archives are up to date. You need to do this when you setup the options initially, or change the options or are offline for a long time. Recent Files Archived lets you see the list of files archived recently so you can see what has been done or undo the changes etc. The last 10 files archived are listed here for quick access. If you click on one of them you can see its archive.

If you double-click on the status icon the main Active Backup program window will launch. Here you can see a list of any files currently being processed when the backup is online and active. Also in the main window you can see a list of files recently archived. Double click on these to see a full list of revisions for the selected file. You can then see what has changed and extract a revision to undo changes etc.

In the normal Windows file explorer you will now have a new option if you right-click on a file. This lets you access the associated archive for the file so that you can see what changes have been made and undo changes. Notice also in this screen that there are right-click options for AJC Diff, which is the other FREE built-in program used to view differences between the archived file versions.

Easily retrieve old versions of your files!

AJC Active Backup creates a compact Archive of every file it is monitoring online that has changed (e.g. as soon as you save a file). It is very economical with disk space because it stores only the changes each time a new revision is added. For instance, on my PC this very page you are reading is archived by Active Backup. The original page is currently 58Kb (it started out at 50Kb), and the corresponding archive file is currently only 39Kb, 67% of the original and that is after I have made 17 changes to the document. Another example is a Word document I have that is currently 1,903Kb (it has quite a lot of colour photographs interspersed with the text). The archive file size is currently 2,058Kb or just 108% the size of the original, and that is after 10 revisions have been applied.

Each file Archive holds different Versions of all changes made to the file, thereby providing an easy to use Version Control tool for you to view the history of previous online backup versions. You can do this using the FREE included AJC Revision Archive Viewer software shown here:-

Screenshot from AJC Revision Archive Viewer

The ability to store different revisions will be a boon in itself to software developers, or document producers, since the AJC Revision Archive Viewer also uses the AJC Visual Diff Tool to show differences between any versions of the file.

Screenshot from AJC Visual Diff Tool

Effectively when you buy AJC Active Backup you are getting 3 tools in one;

1. Instant online automatic data backup file monitoring using AJC Active Backup
2. Version Control using AJC Revision Archive Viewer
3. Binary or Text file comparison using AJC Visual Diff

To my mind, for the price (around $29, but check the AJC site for current cost), thats a fantastic deal!

(Note that AJC Software also provide discounts on bulk license purchases).

For more detailed information and additional screenshots of AJC Active Backup, visit the AJC Software web site where you can download the fully-functional 30-day trial.

Just try it, I am sure that like me, you will wonder how you did without it! You are essentially provided with continuous data protection, version control and document management software at a fraction of the cost you would pay for other systems.

Click here to download a FREE fully functional 30 day Trial (the download is approx 2.8Mb, and you only need to download once, because if you decide to purchase after the trial you simply activate the full product using your license key).

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