Tim Malloroy:

Since I am lucky enough to have a server on my home network running Windows Sever 2003, I run DeltaCopy. It is rsync for Windows and will automatically backup to another PC or server using differential backups. It will even backup through rsync to a Linux box and can accept rsync backups from Linux. DeltaCopy will work on Microsoft Windows NT4, XP, 2000, 2003 and I have not had any issues on Vista at this point.

Since the application is open source, its free to use and I have had few issues with it. It is not off-site backup, but at least the five PCs and two laptops in my household have critical data backed up. I had thought about an online service but I have too much data so I burn DVDs on the server of the user backup directories weekly using WinRAR (http://www.rarlabs.com/) to compress anything changed from a particular date into an archive file first.

To do this with WinRAR, I right click on the directory where the backups exist. I select “Add to archive…” and use the subsequent dialog box to set up the “where, how, and which” parameters. I then burn the archive files. WinRAR even breaks them up into the correct chunk size for DVDs.

Open Source Backup Program for Windows