Toucan: versatile portable backup utility

Need a tool to keep documents and files on your USB stick safe? Look no further than Toucan, a nifty portable utility that has a few clever tricks up its sleeve.

Figure 1: Toucan’s main window

Unlike other backup utilities out there, Toucan allows you to both synchronize and back up your files, giving you the best of both worlds. While the former allows you to keep files on your USB stick in sync with multiple machines, the latter is perfect for storing backups of your data as compressed archives. The Sync part of Toucan supports several synchronization options:

Mirror deletes everything in the destination and copies everything from source.
Copy does the same thing but without deleting the contents of the destination folder.
Update is the same as Copy but it only copies newer files.
Equalise is like running Update in both directions, giving both of your folders the newest files.

You can also create filters to exclude certain folders and files from being synchronized. For example, if you want to avoid syncing all plain text files, you can create a filter that excludes all the .txt files.

Although Toucan is designed to run off a portable device, you can easily use it on your desktop machine or laptop. Simply choose a path on your local hard disk when installing the utility (Program Files is an obvious choice), and you can use it as an ordinary application.

The Backup section allows you to perform full or incremental backups as well as choose different compression types and compression ratios (Toucan uses the excellent 7-Zip software to handle the compression).

The Security feature can encrypt selected files using the BURP algorithm, which can come in handy if you need to securely store sensitive documents on a USB stick without too much fuss. To encrypt one or multiple documents and files, switch to the Secure tab, add the files you want to encrypt to the right pane, specify a password, select the Encrypt option, and press OK. In a similar manner, you can decrypt the encrypted files and documents.

Toucan is probably not the most advanced backup/synchronization tool out there, but it’s a rather good one. It can both sync and back up your documents, it works with the PortableApps Suite, it can secure sensitive info, and it’s released under GPL. In other words, it’s a must-have utility for portable computing.

Toucan, Backup, Synchronization, Portableapps