General rate: Negative
Great potential but as of Q2 2005, still not ready for serious use. The program provides for disk to disk backup by creating a mirrored direcrory/folder structure, where you specify, and places zipped copies of the files in the appropriate folder. A string is appended to the end of the filename for management purposes as multiple copies from incremental backups can be maintained. eg. You can specify a maximum of X copies be retained for Y amount of time. The program is straight forward and fairly easy to use. The program seems stable but will fail on backups if sufficient memory is not available. It's somewhat of a resource hog in it's memory requirements considering what it's doing. I thought I would dedicate an old and otherwise useless WinXP machine with 128MB RAM as a Server to Server backup machine but 128MB wasn't enough - 256 was OK. The user interface is simple - maybe too simple - a little more information such as percent completed and estimated time of completion would be useful. As backups go, it's not particularly speedy, but zipping never is. I'll gladly take the speed hit for the compression. So far, so good. Now for the bad news. It will not backup any files over 2 Gig and when it restores, the restored file's time stamp is destroyed and replaced with the current time. I sent them a note asking about this and promptly received a response. They seem to think that the maximum file size in windows is only 2G - this is nonsense. It was 2G in DOS under FAT 16, FAT 32 supports 4G files, and NTFS is currently limited only by the size of the volume. There technical support people are not very technical. In response to the time and date stamp problem, they said this was by design. If this is if fact true (I obviously doubted the respondents credibility) it needs to be redesigned. This is a backup program. When you restore, you generally want EXACTLY what you backed up to be restored. Imagine doing a full restore and having every file on your system dated today - system files, program files, data files - everything. Duh!