It's important to back up your files. In the immortal words of the Seinfeld cast: "Yada, yada, yada ... ."

You know you should back up your data on a regular (preferably continuous) basis, but finding an affordable, easy and transparent way is, realistically speaking, the only way a busy small business owner is going to do it. The good news is that products available to even the smallest of businesses are gaining in all three of the above criteria. One example is today's release of FileKeeper Professional from Yosemite Technologies.

The software is designed to provide small businesses and home office workers with backup and version rollback software for laptop and desktop computers. The focus of the product is on ease of use, according to Yosemite Technologies CEO George Symons.

FileKeeper takes a "set it and forget it" approach to protecting your documents. (Click for larger image)

FileKeeper integrates with Windows Explorer to let you recover a file version from within the familiar right-click interface. (Click for larger image)

FileKeeper's Search and Recover features is designed to let you search using a portion of a document name. (Click for larger image)

Whether you work at home or in the office, you can implement a data protection solution quickly and then forget about it. "You shouldn't know it's there, until you need to use it for something," he said.

If you do need to recover data or roll back to an early point in time, the software uses a Windows Explorer interface to make the process quick and easily. "You just right click with your mouse," Symons said.

While FileKeeper Professional is transparent to the naked eye, "it runs continuously in the background," Symons said. The software, he said, isn't events-based, but rather uses near continuous data protection (CDP).

CDP is big in the corporate world and works by automatically saving a copy every time changes are made to a file. "For example, I know I've hit 'save' instead of 'save as,' before. This lets you go back to a snapshot of the file."

The CDP approach is also effective for applications that you might have open all the time. "You probably have Outlook or Outlook Express files open all day. You can set FileKeeper Pro to take hourly snapshots, for example, of your .pst files." In that scenario, should you need to recover messages in Outlook, you lose only the e-mails sent or received after the last hourly snapshot.

The benefit is that it allows you to restore files that might be corrupted or accidentally deleted. Or if you inadvertently overwrite a file, you can go back to any point in time before the changes were lost.

File versions are automatically stored in a repository on an internal hard disk, the company said, which lets you recover data even when the computer is not connected to an external storage device. Symons said that because only the bytes that have changed in a new version of a file are stored, disk space is used efficiently.

Of course, having the backup data stored locally won't help you should your computer be lost or damaged. The files and changes are also automatically saved to an external storage location, a USB hard disk drive or networked-attached storage device. Symons said you just have to point FileKeeper Pro to the device or devices you want to store the backup data.

FileFeeper Pro is available for $29.95.

Dan Muse is executive editor of internet.com's Small Business Channel, EarthWeb's Networking Channel and ServerWatch.

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