Keeping a backup of all of your essential files is a good habit. In case of loss of your files, we can quickly get a copy from the last backup. But for keeping regular backups, we need a backup software. Ideally, a backup program should not be very complicated and allows us to perform backups without wasting a lot of time. Toucan – an open-source portable backup utility for Windows.
Toucan is portable and is we can keep it on the same drive on which we store the backups which makes everything so easy. We start using Toucan by launching toucan.exe. Toucan can do three things for us – it can backup files, it can sync files across two folders and it can encrypt files.
We have to create backups jobs in order to create backups. In each of the backup jobs, we have to specify the source folders and the destination folders. We can also specify the backup type such as complete, update, differential, mirror or restore. We can choose to compress the backups using 7-Zip and it can also password protect the backups.
For syncing two folders, we again have to create a sync job. In the sync job, we have to pick two folders – source and destination. We can pick a sync function – copy, mirror, equalize, move or clean. For comparing files, we can choose many methods such as file size check file, modification time check, short data comparison, full data comparison etc.
For encrypting files, we basically have to pick a folder and then the files inside it. After that we can choose to encrypt or decrypt the files inside it. It makes used of a CLI encryption tool called ccrypt. This tool uses a very strong file encryption cipher AES 256 bit.
All in all, it is a very fast and easy to use backup, sync and encryption software. It is a great way to make regular backups of your files on portable drives.
You can download Toucan freeware from https://github.com/PortableApps/Toucan.