Backing up files, like checking for computer viruses is something that every personal computer owner should routinely perform, but often neglect until it is too late. Every computer should have an automated backup system that is easy to use…and yet they do not. Windows ships with the Microsoft backup program. It has a nice interface, but is not widely used for one primary reason: it cannot be scheduled nor can command line parameters be passed in from a scheduling agent.

TaskZip is a system agent that will automatically archive specified files and folders into a single zip file (pkzip compatible format). You can backup across a network, from computer to computer, or even to a zip or jaz drive (note that disk spanning not supported at this time). You can create and schedule an unlimited number of backup jobs, each containing as many folders or files as you want. TaskZip has a simple, step-by-step wizard to guide you through selecting files/folders, backup locations, and backup scheduling. The program's scheduler can run backups at any time, and you can set recurring schedules for running daily, weekly, or monthly backups. For each backup job, you can even maintain up to 99 older (grandfather) backup copies of each zip archive file.

You can password protect the zip file archives. When data loss occurs, you can highlight a backup job and with the click of a button, bring up your default windows zip shell (Winzip, Enzip, Freezip, etc.) to restore the corrupt files. You can also forego compression and just backup files and folders directly.

This help file is arranged in an easy to follow layout that follows the application’s features. To minimize the download size, screenshot gifs are used sparingly and where appropriate.

During the initial run, the table is empty because no jobs have been created. The toolbar buttons have the following functionality:

• New: Add a new backup job for TaskZip to process. The number of backup jobs you can add is limited only by the size of your harddrive (how many .tzp files you can store).

• Remove: Will remove the currently highlighted backup jobs. You will be prompted to confirm the deletion you are about to make.

• Open: Will open an existing backup job whose properties you can alter.

• Copy: Will copy the highlighted backup job to a new backup job prefixed with "Copy Of ". It will then open up the new "Copy Of " backup job for editing.

• Backup: Will execute the backup job that is currently highlighted. Will not alter the date of last run, or date of next run field values.

The File menu bar has the following functions:

• Close: Will close the Scheduled Backup Jobs Dialog, leaving the tray icon running. Note: to close the tray icon, right click it, and select Exit TaskZip from the popup menu.

The Action menu bar has all the functions available in the toolbar above, plus the following functions:

• View Transaction Log File: Will load the transaction log into Notepad.exe. The transaction log lists every folder or file that is copied (can be multiple folders or files inside every backup job). Any failures encountered during the archival process will be noted directly after the file or folder that failed in this log.

• View Error Log File: Will load the error log into Notepad.exe. The error log differs from the transaction log in that it contains only errors, and it includes very detailed error diagnostics including the error number and description, the module and function in which the error occurred, etc.

The Help menu bar contains several functions to assist users:

• Contents: Will load this HTML help file for you to peruse.

• License Agreement: Will popup a message box indicating that this product is freeware and can be freely distributed.

• TaskZip Homepage: Will load your default browser and set the url to TaskZip’s homepage. You can download TaskZip, download other freeware/shareware, look at the download/VB/Access links, etc. from this website.

• About: Will popup the About dialog box indicating version and build number, copyright information, license information, etc.

The list view box at the lower half of the screen lists every backup job you have built. (Note that these backup jobs are each saved as an .tzp file in the "BackupJobs" subdirectory off of your TaskZip application directory.) The fields in the list view are as follows:

• Backup Job Type Icon: The first element on the far left of the list view is an icon. There are two possible icons that can be displayed (as shown above in figure 2). One icon represents a backup job using zip compression to squeeze all of the selected files and folders down into a single zip file. The other icon represents a backup job using no compression, just performing a straight file copy of the files and folders selected.

• ID: This is the automatically assigned backup job ID number.

• Backup Job Name: This is the name of the backup job you assigned when you built the job (step 1).

• Last Run Date: This is the date in which the backup job was last run (if never, then defaults to today).

• Next Run Date: This is the date that the backup job is next scheduled to run based upon the days of week, frequency, day of month, etc.

• Time: This is the time of day that the backup job is scheduled to run.

Be forewarned that the output zip filename is derived from a condensed (spaces removed) and scrubbed (symbols removed) version of the name you enter here. Therefore, it is not suggested, but you can use hyphens, tildes, and other symbols in the name. You can also exceed 8 characters for a name. However, if TaskZip is having any problems saving or opening .tzp files, then I would urge you to try the following naming convention modifications:
1) Limit to 8 characters if using Novell.
2) Remove the following (and similar) characters: `~!@#$%^&*()_+=-:;’"/?.>,<.
3) Be sure that the name is unique from other backup jobs (esp. after strip and scrub).
4) Be sure not to start backup job names with a number.

Also note that when zip files store the source path information, they do not save the drive name. This is important when you go to restore archived files en masse after a hard drive crash, and you have hundreds of paths. If you can not easily distinguish which folders go on which drive, then you are better off creating separate backup jobs for the separate drives.

Once you have entered a name, click the Next button to proceed to step 2. This step will prompt you for scheduling information. The fields are as follows:

• Start Time: This is the time of day that you want the backup job to occur on. The proper entry format is "hour : minute" and then "AM" or "PM". You can enter other variations of date too such as military time "14:00", or use only an "A" or a "P" or use lower case "a", etc.

• Frequency: This is the rate at which the backup job will be repeated: daily, weekly, or monthly. Daily and weekly are identical in that the days you check below are repeated every week. Monthly will produce a drop-down box containing the 1^st – 28^th day of the month on which backup jobs can be repeated.

• Monday-Sunday: These checkboxes represent what day(s) of the week you want the backup job to recur on. For a frequency of daily, the default values are all days of the week except Sunday checked. For a frequency of weekly, the default value is only Sunday checked. Note that these checkboxes are not visible if a frequency of "monthly" is selected.

• Day of Month: If the frequency is set to monthly, then this drop down box will be visible. It prompts you for the one day of the month on which you want the backup job to occur. You are limited to days 1 –28 (I took the coding shortcut to prevent special code for handling the variations in month length—28 for February, and 30 or 31 for other months).

Once you are satisfied with the schedule, click the Next button to proceed on to step 3 where you select the source files and folders (input).

• File Specifications: This list box contains all of the files and wildcard specs that you select for backup. Each file or wildcard spec is given a single line in the list box.

• Add: This button will popup a dialog box in which you can select multiple files or build a wildcard spec to backup. The wildcard spec can be one of two options: *.* for all files, or *.ext where you specify the extension name.

• Remove: This button will delete the currently highlighted files/wildcard specs in the File Specifications listbox.

• Include Subdirectories: When checked, this checkbox forces all subdirectories below the selected directory to also be backed up. This is a very important item.

• Drag-n-Drop: Click this button to popup Windows Explorer. Drag and drop mutliple files and folders from Explorer directly into the Source Files / Folders listbox to speed up your file selection process.

When you click the Add button, the dialog box below will popup. You can use this dialog to select multiple files and add them to the backup job as shown in Figure 6.

You can also specify a wildcard list to backup from a directory (and its subdirectory). Click the "Wildcard Groups" tab on the Select File(s) to Backup tab. Note (in Figure 7) that you can select all files (*.*), select a specific extension from the common extensions drop down box, or type in an extension into the text box (other extension).

Once you have selected all of the source files and folders, you can click Next to proceed to the fourth step where you will find the target directory for the zip file (output).

• Target Directory: This text box and accompanying browse button are used to specify the target directory into which the recurring zip file backup will be placed. If compression (step 4) is not selected, then this is the target directory into which all of the source files will be copied. The name of the zip file placed into this directory will be a scrubbed (of symbols) and stripped (of spaces) version of the backup job name entered in step 1 above.

• Browse: This button will load up the browse dialog box for you to select the target location for either the archive zip file, or the archive multiple files/folders copied directly.

• Explorer: This button will fire up the Windows Explorer, pointing either to the target directory if one is entered, or to the application directory. You can use this button to easily conduct file operations such as adding new directories, deleting files/directories, etc.

After you have selected all files to backup, you can click Next to proceed to the fifth step. This step permits you to select the type of backup job this will be: Full Backup or Incremental Backup. A Full Backup will archive every file in the backup set. An Incremental Backup will only backup files whose date/time has changed since the date of last backup.
Typically, you should just use the default Full Backup option. However, numerous users requested that we add an Incremental Backup feature to reduce network traffic and storage requirements on really large backup sets; so we built the feature. However, if you need to use an Incremental Backup, here are the steps to do so:

1. Create a Full Backup Job that is scheduled to run Weekly or Monthly that will archive all files.
2. Create a complimentary Incremental Backup Job (same files archived) that is scheduled to run Daily. (If the Full Backup is Weekly, make it say Sunday and leave Sunday out of the Incremental Daily Backups.)
3. Schedule the Time of the Incremental Backup for late in the day, say around 11:50pm so that all files altered on each day will be backed up.

Note that there are a few limitations of the incremental backup. One is that you must set the time of the Incremental Backup schedule to very late in the day (zip.exe only checks dates, not times). Another limitation of Incremental Backups is that they only work with compression. The final limitation is that files you copy or move into a directory that retain an older file date/time stamp WILL NOT be recognized as recent modifications; and thus will not be incrementally backed up.

Once you have selected a backup type, you can click Next to jump to the final step. This step contains advanced options for your backup:

• No Compression: When checked, all source files and folders are copied directly (mirrored) to the target directory as is (no compression). There are reasons why you may not want to compress: copy files directly to be picked up by some polling agent, copy zip files from one archive to a second tier archive, etc.

• Zip Compression: Zip Compression is the default selected. When checked, all source files and folders are compressed into a single .zip file and stored in the target directory under the name of the backup job. Typically users will want to compress the backup output to save space, keep archives organized, etc.

• Number Previous Copies: This option is only available if the Compress Data checkbox is checked. It allows for between 1 to 12 copies of previous zip file backups to be retained and stamped with the prefix "_n" before the ".zip" where n is the number 1 to 12. These copies give you additional safety in cases where you are unaware of a files corruption and you need to restore it after several "bad" backups have been made (just go back several versions and restore from an old backup).

• Password Protect: This option is only available if the Compress Data checkbox is checked. It enables a zip archive to have all files password protected. Users can still open the zip file in their favorite zip shell (e.g. Winzip); however, they must enter the correct password (that you entered here in TaskZip Backup Job Definition Wizard, Step 4) to access the files.

TaskZip has the ability to store a user’s preferences. These preferences are saved into a file called ‘TaskZip.txt’ and is stored in the application directory. Currently there are two preference settings that are saved:

• Maximum # Backup Copies: You can select a numeric value from 1-99 from this drop-down box. The value you select will be the default range automatically placed into the Backup Job Definition Wizard’s ‘Number Backup Copies’ drop down.

• Stop Auto Backups On Error: Occasionally, users will encounter situations where backup errors occur (user’s machine is turned off for the night accidentally, machine name changed, etc.). When these errors occur, you have one of two options: silently log the error and proceed on, or log the error and popup a message box, halting further processing until an operator confirms the error message (clicks Ok). Selecting ‘No’ at this drop-down on the dialog below will silently log the error; whereas selecting ‘Yes’ will halt other backup jobs until you confirm.

There are a few stipulations that I will request in exchange for the source code:
1) Leave the application name the same.
2) Leave PBSystems as the author’s website (although you can add your name and website to the About box and help file).
3) Do not charge a fee for the modified application, distribute it for free (unless there are reasonable costs associated with distributing it).

In the near future, these will be re-written as ini file format (although they will retain the .tzp extension). This modification will make it easier to add or change properties than using a sequentially built file.

Use of TaskZip (hereinafter 'SOFTWARE') is contingent on your agreement to the following terms:

If you are using the SOFTWARE free of charge under the terms of this Agreement, you are not entitled to any support whatsoever; however, you can try and email us…I will most likely respond unless am too busy, or the answer is in the FAQ on the website.

THIS SOFTWARE AND THE ACCOMPANYING FILES ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WHETHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED.

In no event shall the author be held liable for any damages whatsoever, including without limitation, damages for loss of business profits, business interruption, loss of business information, or any other loss arising from the use or inability to use the software.