Bought a Buffalo external hard drive to back up photos, music and films etc.

The western digital HDs come with built in software that automatically backs up your chosen folders when you plug the USB lead in.

Anyone know of some similar software? Most I have found seem to be made for drives that are always plugged as you have to set a schedule when you want it to be backed up.

Thanks

Edit: Oh and free would be nice!

[Edited on 22/9/2010 by greggors84]

Cheapskate version, your own batch file!

http://www.sandstorming.com/2006/06/backup-usb-drive-on-insertion/

The Western Digital software is a nightmare if something goes badly wrong, it took me a week to restore the photos on my daughters Notebook from one.

I would recommend you use conventional backup software such as Cobian Backup create a backup job and run it manually.

To backup photos I use Picasa 3 to create CD/DVDs for archiving.

I've a few customers that use syncback Linky They rave about it but I've never used it myself.

Cheers

Rich

Another one that you can set up and leave to do the back up as and when you have your backup drive connected is Yadis

The thing is don't be tempted to try and back up your whole PC -- just back up the data and essential drivers.

It is also better to use full backups rather than incremental backup.

Full backups take longer but it isn't a problem and lot of backup software has the option to shutdown the PC once the job is finished.

Best way to backup email and email account settings is to use Thunderbird for mail and back it up using Mozbackup, this software will restore all your emails account settings and email passwords instantly if you need to recover from a hard disk failure or just change PCs.

Mozbackup will also backup Firefox bookmarks, addons and passwords.

allwaysync is free
http://allwaysync.com/download.html

and so is the home backup genie software
http://www.genie-soft.com/free_products/free_timeline.aspx