Many people want to keep their PC safe but don’t want to know any more about how it’s done than they do about how their microwave oven works, so long as it works. TrueSafe has responded with a backup option intended to reduce the hassle of backups. It’s a “set-and-forget” program that runs in the background, but TrueSafe Personal Edition also offers secure online storage and other extras, such as the ability to back up PCs remotely over the Internet.

When we first opened TrueSafe, we were prompted to create a username and password and to register online to access the program’s main interface, with e-mail confirmation. However, the procedure was quick, free, and painless, and it enabled us to access TrueSafe’s online features. The main interface is a compact dialog displaying all our active backup profiles, with toolbar icons for running backups, editing our profiles, restoring files, and accessing the program’s settings, which include scheduling backups and configuring hosted backups. TrueSafe can perform several kinds of backups; select files, whole directories, or entire disks; and back up your files to a disk drive, network share, or portable drive. We started by creating a new profile, a four-step process that involves choosing files to back up and an archive destination, setting a schedule (or selecting manual backup), and naming the file. We chose to create an archive right away, backing up our Documents directory to a second hard drive.

Our only concern was that the default location for the program’s archive was our C drive. It’s not wise to have your backup archive located on the same disk as the data being backed up. We changed our archive destination, but an advisory is in order. That’s a small quibble, though, since TrueSafe proved both capable and easy to use, especially in automatic operation. TrueSafe Personal Edition seems able to go toe-to-toe with any freeware backup tool out there.