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Information about Backup4all 2.3.2

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Grorgy:
Following a rather annoying experience with another company, I was wondering if Backup4All discriminates against those who purchase through DonationCoder with a discount code or if the published policies on the website are applicable no matter what you paid for the license?

mouser:
DC will never make any discount arrangement that restricts the rights/support/upgrade-policy of a buyer.  If you should ever be told by any company whose product you purchased through DC that you are not entitled to an upgrade because you bought with a discount, let us know and we will step in.  :up:

mediaguycouk:
I've just had a play with the demo and am about to place an order for this software. I have to say I'm impressed.

+ The include exclude selection and filtering of folders is fantastic
+ The speed of the backup is excellent
+ It doesn't seem to have any problems with my samba share (which plenty of others do)
+ Allows the zip files to be made in a temp file in case you have a slower network connection

I'm sure I'll find some faults as I continue to use it, but I might forget to actually post them :)

Forgot to say
(Discount code doesn't work any more, however the standard and pro version has a $10 discount applied anyway)

tranglos:
I've just had a play with the demo and am about to place an order for this software. I have to say I'm impressed.
-mediaguycouk (December 10, 2007, 12:44 PM)
--- End quote ---

Plenty other niceties, too. Among those I don't remember mentioned in earlier discussion:

- You don't need to run Backup4All in the tray. If you use Windows Scheduler, there is no additional load on your system; the program only starts when a job is scheduled and can be configured to exit when done.

- I love being able to drag folders into the Source window, rather than fish for folders in a tree one at a time or select checkboxes. (The checkboxes are also available, though).

- This may have been mentioned, but open/locked file backup is smooth sailing, no problems there at all.

However, having used it for a year, I have a pretty long list of things I'd like to see improved. The first time I made a request I was pretty much brushed off by the author (politely, but still), and since there is no user forum, there is little one can apparently do to request a feaure or influecne the program's direction. Here's a short version of what I'm missing in Backup4All and some bugs I've found - I have yet to send it to the author, but after his first response I'm not too hopeful:

features

- backup files as they change, with an optional minimum time span between backups

- For versioning, there is an option to "Limit maximum number of stored backups", but no option to limit by date, i.e. Keep old versions of files for no more than n days. The latter is more useful / more intuitive than the number of backups, because e.g. I know I want to keep old versions for a month, but I don't know how many copies will be made in a month (and if I change the schedule, the number of backups will also change, which will in turn affect the limit). In other words, I don't care how many old versions I keep; I do care about always having access to versions at least a month old, and there is no way to configure that (unless you put no limit on old versions at all).

- ability to run regular backups (full, incremental or differential) without zipping. (The Mirror mode copies without zipping, but does not do versioning. If you mirror to folders with a datestamp, it copies all the files every time.) Zipping is of course hugely useful, but makes it hard to compare versions, since you must unzip the files first.

- There is no support for comparing stored versions. It should be pretty easy to add integration with Beyond Compare, WinMerge etc.

- when using the mirror mode, it does not scan the target folder, but copies everything, even if the target files are already in place. This is a more general issue - Backup4All relies ONLY on its catalog files (bkc). If you delete all mirrored files but keep the bkc, it will not restore the missing files, because the bkc file tells it they are present. And the opposite: if the target files are already there, it will still copy them over if the bkc file indicates they are absent. This has cost me several hours recently (backup over 54 kbit LAN).

- pause a job while it is running (important if a scheduled backup kicks in just when you're doing something disk-intensive)

- suspend all scheduled backup jobs (this can be done by manually editing Windows Scheduler tasks, but it should be a one-click operation, e.g. when installing software or running an operation that requires lots of disk throughput or network bandwidth)

- ability to backup selected registry keys to .reg files (very, very few programs do this. HandyBackup does, but it's $99 and misses a lot of other features, like backing up open files)

- automatically run tasks that were missed or have failed

- provide a remaining time estimate for a running job (there is a progress meter, but a rough estimate in minutes would be more useful)

- enable filtering in the jobs pane (e.g. show only tasks that have not been run yet; only tasks that are not scheduled; tasks with warnings or errors; tasks that have FTP or LAN as target, tasks that are scheduled to run today, etc - lots of possibilities here)

bugs

- error messages are too generic, especially for FTP-related errors. If, for example, you make a typo in the ftp server hostname, all the log message says is "could not connect". What it should report instead is DNS lookup failure, which would immediately tell you that the hostname is wrong.

- If Backup4All is configured to exit when a scheduled job is finished, it will quit even if you started it manually and are editing a profile in the dialog box. There is no prompt, it just quits while you're typing in it. A little annoying if you've just spent 5 or 10 minutes fine-tuning your file selection...

- There is a bug in its bug reporting feature (try it, "Support request" under the Help menu)

marek

Curt:
I don't understand this Backup4All, but that is no surprise because there are so many things connected to computers, that I don't get.

My version is PRO 3.11 build 300. The first year I didn't care to use it because I only had the one and same harddrive. But now my XP is rapidly getting more and more unstable, so I got myself a USB 2.0 Hard Drive for backups. Not fully understanding what type of backup I should use, I simply tried them all - and this is what left me completely in the dark: No matter what type of backup I used, the resulting files on the USB drive would not take up more than approx. 3 MB in total. How is it that 100 GB can scrimp to 3 MB?? I don't trust that! I am so sure that I have told B4A to "make FULL backup", and added ALL files and folders ("C:\ "). I also tried both differental and incremental backups, but could not notice any difference - the total size is still around 3 MB.

So maybe this kind of backup is for settings and such only, or what? I don't really know. I am not even interested in saving some settings, half the joy of getting a new PC is to play around and change both this and that, but I am finally very much interested in understanding HOW I am to make a genuine backup of my PC, before the content is all gone?

I have some fine programs to help me move from one PC to another, but if I don't get a new PC in time, these programs may (also) be worthless because I didn't understand HOW to secure the actual FILES and not merely some settings, or what it is that B4A is backing.

My only backup media is this USB 2 hard drive, I don't have a burner.

Can Backup4All backup the actual files from my computer?  :tellme:

Information about Backup4all 2.3.2

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