Backup

Advanced

Whether you're a power user, or if you want to get the most out of Argentum Backup, you'll find it useful to read all the following topics about the advanced features of Argentum Backup.

These advanced features include:

• File and folder masks.
• Stacking.
• Password protection.
• Global settings can be overridden for every task.
• Event logging.

Masks

With the file masks you are able to filter files you want to back up. To limit your files to a restricted set, simply type in corresponding file masks, separated by commas or spaces. File masks may contain "*" (asterix) and "?" (question) wildcards.

By default all masks are considered to be including. If you want to specify an excluding mask, prefix a "-" (minus) sign to the front of the mask. To see how these masks work and how to specify them, look at the list of built-in templates. These templates are just the examples to help you have a quick start.

With Argentum Backup you can also exclude any particular folder or file from the backup set. Just prefix a "-" (minus) sign to the front of the corresponding entry in the list of items to back up.

Stacking is a powerful, fully automated engine, which allows you to have several backup copies available in the backup store, each copy for a particular time point. This enables you to keep several backup copies of your files and to get back to any of them whenever required.

Once enabled, stacking must be configured a little. In particular, you should assign an interval between successive stackings, and the expiration date, which determines how soon stacked copy expires and hence becomes to be purged.

Stacked copies are stored in a collection of folders. Each folder is named with the date of when a particular copy was actually being stacked. All such folders are placed under the main backup store folder. You can call a collection of these folders a stack.

To ensure greater security you may password protect your backups if required. Your backup gets encrypted once this option is selected. You can choose between the traditional Zip encryption, and a newer, significantly stronger AES 128-bit and 256-bit encryption mode.

The regular Zip encryption is non-secure, but is fast and portable.

The advanced AES encryption provides very strong 256-bit cryptographic security for your files, and is the only option if you have important security requirements for your data. This option is slower and requires an AES-compatible Zip utility, such as WinZip 9 or later, in order to extract the encrypted data.

Overriding

For every task you create, Argentum Backup lets you override and individually assign:

• Location of backup store
• Copying mode
• Stacking options
• Password protection

All in one, this provides you with a lot of flexibility over planning your backup tasks.

Argentum Backup carefully records all its activity into a special log file to let you afterwards analyze this information in full detail. In particular, you can view the statistics accumulated, look at the files and tasks processed, examine all the problems found and more. Here is an example of such a report. It will show you a backup of Windows system folders under Windows XP.

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