LazySave review

File backup can be the difference between a tranquil computing experience and a hair-tearing trip to the asylum. It’s certainly better to be protected, so that when your important documents, photos, music or video get mangled by an indifferent computer failure, you can safely, easily and quickly restore them.

LazySave is a start-and-forget backup service that operates as your computer’s screensaver, so it should never interrupt your computing and only starts working when you take a break. Instead of swirling lines or pictures of your loved ones, the LazySave screensaver shows the backup progress and lets you know when everything is safely archived.

You access LazySave’s controls through the Windows Screensaver dialog. Although the control panel is primitive in design, it allows you to define multiple new backup sets. These are used to back up specific folders on your computer. For each backup set you can specify a backup source and location, apply a filter to allow only specified file types and indicate when a file needs to be backed up. The last option lets you control whether files are selected for backup based on the status of their Windows archive attribute, or based on whether the file’s date/time attribute has changed. Setting this means you only back up files that have changed since the last backup run.

Simple version control enables you to save to a different backup folder for each day, deleting the oldest folder after a pre-determined number of days. While functional, this execution of version control is far from elegant, and means that the size of your backups will eventually stabilize at the number of days archived multiplied by the size of the source folder.

LazySave falls short of what we would normally expect to see in backup software – it doesn’t provide any recovery routines, for example, doesn’t employ any kind of compression and won’t back up your entire system. For these reasons, although it’s a good idea, LazySave is expensive at £15.