Hi all, I am enjoying great and fast software provided by Piriform, and I would like to ask about this type of software, of course, hopefully is free :
a system and application (user data) backup software, that help us to backup various type of valueable data, in the application original format, and help us to restore in case of system failure & reinstall. "application original format" is i think good in the sense that...we can restore manually for some circumstances when the said backup software not work.
Is difficult for us to backup various software data from time to time, like data that I would like to backup:
1) outlook settings, outlook email account settings.
2) msn msg history, received files
3) yahoo messenger msg history
4) skype msg history
5) IE bookmarks, RSS feed data
6) free download manager download list
7) etc etc...

is Piriform has such plan to build such software? (preferrable Piriform due to their great job in CCleaner, and defraggler, I like them a lot).
Any other good software for the case above? especially those free, and updated from time to tim.

many thanks.

There are literally tons of free backup software all over the Internet, such as those which use the widely support ZIP archive format some last freeware versions are listed here. Don't forget our own Freeware list on these forums, you may find a gem listed in there for doing backups.

One backup tools is built right into most Windows versions if you've installed it, it's easily installable via 'Add/Remove Programs->Add/Remove Windows Components 'and it's called Microsoft Backup. Microsoft Backup is available in the 'Start Menu->Program->Accessories->System Tools'. With it you can back up your whole system or just the files you want, and preferably store the backup on a secondary disk partition or another hard drive since the backup will typically be huge. There's more reading about Windows backup tools via these Microsoft searches for backup tool, and this one for backup software.

looking at CCleaner can do application specific housekeeping, i am looking at application specific backup tool, for example:
for msn, we would like to backup msg history, received files only.
for yahoo messenger, we would like to backup msg history only.
for IE, we would like to backup bookmarks, RSS feed data
etc.

we won't choose to backup the program files, as in the case of system failture, we will install, cleanly from new downloads. But we have to re-instate those user data like the 3 examples above.

Backup tool in the market mostly are backup at folder/harddisk level, which is too 'heavy duty'.