Backup Software Review
As part of our objective to educate home users and small business about backup software and the need to backup, we thought that it would be worthwhile reviewing some of the backup software options in the market place for backing up your PC, software and data (outside of just online backup).
Online Backup isn’t for everyone and not for backing up everything either. Therefore, combining backup software for your PC and operating system (+ software) might be a wise investment and strategy for securing your critical data.
The best way to review these tools is to compare the key features each of them offers. The 4 PC software tools that seem to be the most popular in the market at the moment include Acronis True Image ($70), Nero 9 ($108), Symantec Norton Ghost ($100), and Windows Vista Backup (free).
Lets compare some key features:
Backup Process
What you are looking for here is a simple way to find your files and select them for backup. The only tool that doesn’t seem to offer this in an easy to use way is the Vista Backup service.
The second feature is what is backed up. Does it backup everything all of the time (full backup), or is it just the differences. All services seem to offer both a full backup and an incremental backup service.
Restoring
This needs to be simple. From the research we conducted, Acronis and Nero 8 were best at this.
What was also interesting was that many of the providers didn’t offer a very user friendly process to perform a full system restore (should your hard drive crash and your OS no longer work). The issue with Vista’s service was it required Windows to be reinstalled before a restore could be started.
Nero and Symantec allow you to restart your PC and the restore process directly from the install discs (no Windows required).
Scheduling
Scheduling is available via all of the backup software tools. Some where simpler to use than others.
Compression
Compression reduces the size of the backup data, conserving space on the destination media. All the backup software compressed data in their own way. Vista Backup saved the data in a ZIP format.
Imaging
Imaging takes a snapshot of the entire contents of your computer’s hard drive. Its particularly useful when a PC completely dies on you and you want to restore the software and files to a new PC. If you have the software CDs, you can manually reinstall them. If you don’t, imaging can be a life saver. Imaging was possible with Acronis, Nero and Symantec.
Media support
The backup media supported by each backup software is also very important. All products allowed you to save data to a USB key or separate partition on a hard drive as well as external hard drive. Nero 8 could copy data to both Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs. Windows Vista Backup was not able to backup to multiple discs.
Comparing Online Backup
- So what does Carbonite offer that Backup Software doesn’t:
- Carbonite has a very user friendly interface in terms of setting up your backup. It has a default service that will auto pick your My Computer. You can also manually select and un-select files via Windows Explorer.
Carbonite will backup all of the files on your PC. Once an initial upload has been made of each file, it will then only do automatic incremental updates, ie it will look for changes in files and back then up. So should you require a restore of a file, you will always get the latest file. 3 months worth of versions are also available. - The key advantage that Carbonite offers is that the process for backing up is automatic. Once set-up, there is no need to make changes again.
- The restoring process is simple. You do however require Carbonite to be reinstalled on the PC (which also requires Windows to be on the PC).
- Carbonite allows you to schedule your backup by time of the day and day of the week. As the data is transferred to remote servers, it is compressed and encrypted.
- Carbonite hasn’t been designed to offer an imaging service of your PC. It was designed for backing up data, not the software itself.
- Carbonite will not backup to external media. All backed up data sent to our remote servers in the US. The restore process via download from our remote servers.
