Installing Windows 7 alongside Windows Vista was convenient but I was a little lazy moving my files. When I couldn’t put it off, I dragged and dropped the files from my backup to the Documents folder. Realising that this would take some time, I went off to get some dinner.

Sadly, I returned to find that there had been an out of memory error while copying one of the files. I clicked on Retry but then it happened again.

So I went back to what I’d used to make the backup in the first place, and should have used to restore it, Freefilesync.

This is a clever (and free) utility that can be used for large file transfers or for backups. It compares two folders (including subfolders) and then copies files between them so they become identical.

In this case, where there are gigabytes of files to copy, it has the big advantage that you can save the job and come back to it later on if you are interrupted (I dislike leaving my computer on overnight). It also meant that there was no problem with the fact that I had got halfway through the files when I had to cancel copying.

Files can be compared either by size and date, or by their contents and there are several templates for how to handle situations where a file with the same name and location exists on both sides. These rules can be overruled for individual files.

Just as importantly, you can decide what happens when files are deleted, with the option to copy them to another folder, just to make sure nothing important is lost.