A simple step-by-step guide to help you make your first backup.

Let's suppose you want to make a ZIP-backup of "C:\Program Files\Abakt".
The following steps describe how to create and execute a Profile to do just that.

1. Start Abakt and create a new Profile. [File | New Profile].
2. Go to page Source [F6]:
   Click the button 'Add'. [Alt+A]
   Browse to "C:\Program Files\Abakt\" and click OK.
   
3. [Optionally] On the Files-panel: Right-click a file, a popup menu appears that will help you create the most common file-masks.
   You can review/edit these masks on page Filters [F7].
4. Go to page Action/Action Type [F8]:
   Select the desired Action: "Zip".
5. Go to page Action/Action Type Settings [F9]:
   Review the settings for the selected Action ("Zip"). The default settings are Ok.
6. Go to page Destination [F10]:
   Click the button 'Directory' and select an existing directory. Or create a new one.
7. To create the backup click the button 'Execute Action'. [Ctrl+X]

Rephrased: Exclude all files in a directory except for one (or more) specific file(s).

Following is an example of how to exclude all files in "C:\Test\", except the file "C:\Test\keep-me.txt".

1. The directory "C:\Test\" must be selected (yellow checkbox).
   Unselected directories will be ignored throughout the rest of the filter process.
2. Right-click the file "keep-me.txt" in the Files view. In the popup choose: "Add File To - Include Filter and Exclude All Others".
   This creates two filter-masks:
   a) Exclude: "C:\Test\|*". Tell Abakt to exlude all files in "C:\Test\".
   b) Include: "C:\Test\|keep-me.txt". This mask overrides the exclude mask above.
   The Include filter acts as an override filter for the Exclude filter.
3. At this point all files in the directory "C:\Test\" are excluded except for "keep-me.txt".
   You can repeat step 2 for other files you want to force-include.

You can use the command line options to feed the Windows Task Scheduler.

1. Create a Windows shortcut-file to Abakt with a Target like this:
   "C:\Program Files\Abakt\Abakt.exe" -b "C:\Profiles\MyProfile.abp"
   Or like this:
   "C:\Program Files\Abakt\Abakt.exe" -b -x -m "MyGroupOfProfiles.abg"
2. Instruct the Windows Task Scheduler to call the shortcut you created.

You can call a .BAT file to perform more advanced tasks. Refer to the manual for Abakt's command line parameters.

Following is an example of a .BAT script that calls Abakt and sends a status e-mail.
You should probably modify the script a little so that it works on your system.

The script uses blat, a command line utility to send mail. Download blat.zip and extract it to "C:\Program Files\blat\".

Abakt 0.9.0-beta3 and higher:
When creating Zip archives (using ZipForge) you can set Zip64 Mode to 'Always' or 'Automatic' to create large archives.