GSplit

Backing up your data rarely is an easy undertaking, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. But as the sheer volume of information we need to protect has grown, the physical media--recordable CDs or DVDs--many people use for backups hasn't really kept pace. So when it comes time to backup 40 GB of photos, files, or records, your only choice for local backup might seem to be to buy a second hard drive, and keep the files there--an expensive proposition. That's where freebie GSplit comes in.

This simple, free program takes massive archive files and segments them like a caterpillar into chunks of a more manageable size. Each piece can be sized to fit a specific media, such as a CD, or the program can simply write segments to fill the available space on various backup drives. And of course, it's possible that when it comes time to restore the backup, you may not have a copy of GSplit to restore the archive, so you can build split archives that include their own small reassembly application.