Once you download and unzip the installable, you can invoke the application by using the batch file provided. This application needs a configuration file before it can be succesfully invoked. You can understand the structure of the configuration file here. However, you needn't worry :D, this application bundles a tiny XML editor (a specialized case of Universal Editor), which gets invoked the first time you run the program.

A little bragging, but it's a pleasure to see the universal editor getting reused. Once you configure your list of applications and their associated properties, the application can be invoked with a list of comma separated application identifiers for taking the backup. Following are some of the features of the utility:

• Multiple Application Support: This application can backup multiple applications on your machine in a mutually exclusive manner. You can specify the destination of each of these application archives or can customize the backup strategy for individual application.

• XML Configuration : This application can be configured through a XML file. The configuration syntax especially for the file sets resembles ANT structure. In case you are wondering why did I get into the act of building this, instead of just writing a simple ANT script? For one, certain features like incremental backup was not possible without writing custom ANT tasks and I didn't want to have to burdern of distributing ANT just to run the utility, also most of the users of this tool were ANT agnostic people and the sight of an ANT configuration file would just scare them away.

• Fine grained backup policy. Through the configuration file, one can specify the backup strategy for the application. It never happens that you need to backup the entire application folder because the contents may span gigabytes. However you do want some directories to be backed up everyday and some incrementally. One can specify the backup policy in a very fine grained manner.

• Incremental backup support: This application supports incremental backup. One can specify which directories need to be backed up incrementally. Incremental backup means backup of only those files modified from the time of last backup.

• Backup offset : There are cases when after taking an incremental backup, one runs a script to get a fresh codebase from the server. This makes the entire codebase eligible for the next incremental backup. This cane be prevented by specifying a backup offset in the configuration file.

• Archive cycling : Archives can be cycled in cases where the archive are taken on a network machine or a different directory. Archive cycling is the process of automatically deleting the oldest archives when archiving a fresh copy. This helps manage diskspace.

• FTP or File destination : This application allows you to choose where the archive is to be transferred. It can be a networked machine, a different directory or a remote machine running a FTP server. Separate destinations can be specified per application.

• File exclusion : In most of the cases we want to avoid including some files in the backup, for example .class, .bak, .tmp etc. Through the configuration file you can specify the files to be excluded from the backup.

• Summary mail : You can configure the application to send a summary mail of the archive.