Casper

Casper is a complex and reliable software solution aimed to provide you with the ability of creating a backup image of your system, which can be restored almost immediately, even from an external media device, should your computer crash or fail.

The application is quite simple to understand and handle, resorting to a wizard style appearance to help you copy as well as restore the image of a drive.

It features an ‘Explorer’ component,  so you can browse through the existing drives, in order to copy a disk, create an image as well as schedule such operations to occur at a preferred date and time.

To copy a drive or create an image of a computer partition, you will first have to select the targeted one, then give the task a name and a storage location. You can opt between using backup semantics (which means incremental updates are stored by Casper within separate files) or you can generate a standard image file, depending on your needs.

Moreover, you can configure a series of ‘Backup Storage and Retention Policy’ preferences, which can be fully customized in terms of duration. You can also run a full backup after a certain interval and you can limit space usage, deleting old files when it encounters an insufficient amount of space.

These tasks on be performed immediately, on a schedule or you can create a desktop shortcut, so you can execute them on demand, whenever you want. If you choose to schedule them, you can select the frequency (daily, weekly, monthly), the specific day of the week or even the date and time.

To restore an existing image, you will need to browse through your computer and load the file you want into the utility, then follow the indicated steps, until complete. Other functions include creating and deleting computer partitions.

Overall, Casper proves to be a comprehensive and effective program that can successfully assist you in creating backups of your entire system, enabling you to restore it and carry on with your work without too much time waste, if your computer were to fail unexpectedly.