I'm being asked to recommend an external hard drive with backup software for an old Windows computer that only has USB 1.1. This person is computer illiterate and the solution needs to be super simple (i.e. Apple's Time Machine).

The first question I have is whether USB 2 devices are always backwards compatible with USB 1.1. None of the name brand external hard drives explicitly list 1.1 compatibility.

Second, assuming that USB 2 will work, which external drive bundle includes "one button" backup software that works?

get a USB 2.0 card? They're not expensive.

I thought USB 2 was always backwards compatible with the older USB. I have no reason to think otherwise.

Do they have broadband ?

If so, I'd recommend something like http://mozy.com/ instead.

Does the system have a firewire port? Quite a few systems of that era would include it as an option, so that may be a route to go as well.

Can't help much for backup software though, Time Machine or Carbon Copy Cloner are my solutions these days, and both are OS X specific. Thankfully I no longer have to support Windows machines for people I know.

Have you looked into this?
http://www.rebit.com/index.php

Awesome suggestions, thank you. I hadn't considered an online service and Rebit is exactly what I was looking for with a hardware solution.

(dredging up an old but related thread)

My wife wants her laptop backed up, as does one of her friends (both running Windows XP). I've been pondering the need to make this as painless as possible, since neither my wife nor her friend are the sort to want to click through various options and whatnot. Time Machine, on a Mac, is exactly the right idea.

As far as I can tell, Rebit is the only solution for Windows that explicitly offers the same sort of fire-and-forget interface as Apple's Time Machine. What bothers me is that they don't just sell the software. Instead, they sell it pre-installed on a USB hard drive. Grumble.

Has anybody set up Windows XP's built-in backup utility? I know that it's not exactly fire-and-forget, and that it doesn't back up *everything* like what you might need if your hard drive dies. Is it still useful in a model akin to Time Machine?

The last time I had a dying hard drive on my hands, Acronis True Image ended up saving my bacon. It successfully pulled out an image to a USB hard drive which I restored to a new drive. Very impressive. The question is whether it can be configured to be painless.

Again, I'm being asked to set up backups for a friend without any technical skills. It needs to be painless. Right now, Rebit seems to be the best answer. Thoughts?

The backup program in Windows XP is useful, and does generally work. However it's going to take a bit to script it up, and it will never be really fire and forget. Since it's a traditional "scan the entire drive for changes" backup, it will have a noticeable impact on performance while it is running.

Also, Backup can only cleanly restore the entire machine if it is Windows XP Pro. Windows XP Home offers no ability to recover the entire system when the system has no OS, but it can restore once you do a clean install of XP. More info is here

True Image has a feature called Secure Zone that periodically backs up your hard drive to a hidden partition. I don't know a whole lot about it since I don't use the Secure Zone feature, but my friend uses it on his mom's machine. He put two identical hard drives in it and lets Secure Zone use the 2nd drive as a backup of the first.

Comodo has a free backup tool:
http://backup.comodo.com/

I haven't done any extensive tests yet, but it has all the stuff you'd expect
(Their firewall is pretty good too)

Karen's Replicator meets most of your requirements, and it is free.

It requires a one-time initial setup so it knows what to back up and where to put it, but after that, it is just click the icon, then click on the job name and it's off and running.

The interface for the setup is quite powerful.

It will not back up Windows system files that are currently in use, so it won't create an image that could completely restore a computer after a hard drive crash.

tanstaafl.

I've been liking SyncBack. Scroll down for the free version 3 software. I use it to do backups via FTP. It does scheduling through Windows' scheduler, but it seems to work pretty well and requires no interaction from the user.

*edit*
Here's another neat utility I just read about. Haven't tried it myself.

Anyone using most of these cheap/free backup apps needs to make sure they understand their limitations. The main limitation being that most of the cheap/free tools can't backup files that are open.

This means that they won't backup thing like Outlook or Thunderbird data unless your email client is not running (which can be hard to achieve with Outlook sometimes).

They don't all have this limitation, but it is important to be aware whether or not the one you are using does...

Absent a feature like Vista's volume shadow feature, is it even possible to get a consistent and complete backup of a live Windows XP NTFS volume? At this point, I'm leaning toward setting them up to only backup the user directory rather than the whole system. I'd coach them to kill their mail apps when they weren't using them, but otherwise the backups would appear to run on autopilot.

This leads to one issue with the "painless" part. I want the backups to go to an external USB hard drive. So far as I can tell, all the tools want you to specify the drive by its drive letter. This seems like a recipe for flakiness, unless I can reserve a particular drive letter for a particular drive, regardless of what order different USB thumb drives and whatnot get connected and disconnected from the system.

It appears that the USB Drive Letter Manager can solve this particular problem. I could even have these USB drives show up with Unix-ish mountpoints in the filesystem rather than drive letters. Anybody try this thing? Is there something built into XP that can have a similar effect?

This is true, though I believe that SyncBack has the inelegant workaround of being able to close the application automatically if you like. Not great if you're working on an email at 3am, but then, why are you?

Another program I've tried is Cobain Backup. There was just something about the application I didn't like, but others might.