Australian utilities developer Auslogics, perhaps most famous for the excellent Disk Defrag tool, has extended its range with the release of BitReplica, a straightforward and free backup tool.

The program is clearly aiming for simplicity above all else. Create a new backup job, say, and you’re able to choose common backup sources (Documents folder, Pictures, browser and Outlook Profiles) by just checking boxes, which works for us.

BitReplica does become a little more restrictive when it comes to making your own choice of what you’d like to back up, though: you’re able to select folders only, not specific files within them.

A simple wizard quickly walks you through the creation of your first backup job

Backup destinations are limited to local and network drives only (no burning data to optical drives, no uploading to FTP). And there’s no option to encrypt or password-protect your archive, either.

Still, the program does support plenty of backup types. There’s a simple file copy; a full backup, where you get to configure compression settings and the rules for deleting old backups (it’s easy to, say, keep the last 4, or everything you’ve created in the last week); and you get support for two-way file synchronisation, differential and incremental backups.

And elsewhere, built-in Exclude filters help to define exactly what you’d like to protect; there’s an option to back up alternate data streams, including security information (access permissions and so on); and a simple scheduler will ensure backup jobs are run even when you’re not around.

BitReplica isn’t the most powerful backup tool we’ve seen, then, but for a free program, at version 1.0, it’s looking useful enough: if your needs are simple then it could be a very reasonable backup choice.