there seems to be little further program development going on AFAIK, but I have found the real-time mode very useful. I may be wrong about this, but I think Caddais BOD may operate somewhat differently from programs like FileHamster that seem to require a file to be actually saved before a version is made. OTOH, neither program makes it completely clear what they mean by "real time" backing up...
-DBC
Likewise Derek, thank you. Caddais seems to be closer to MirrorFolder than the more "traditional" backup programs, since it uses a driver, so it does true real-time mirroring. It seems the program was last updated in 2005, but then, in 2005 it may have been ahead of its time
Meanwhile, two more interesting backup solutions:
EMC Retrospect for Windows ($119)http://www.emcinsign...cts/smb/retroforwin/I'm approaching this one with mixed feelings. It seems to be one of the most powerful backup apps, and it's geared towards enterprise rather than home use. It's either extremely advanced, or it's a pedestrian backup program dressed up in plenty of five-dollar words, I cannot tell which. The authors are fond of picking out-of-the-way terms for otherwise simple things: a backup job is a "backup set"; when you mirror a drive to a folder on another drive, you're creating a "subvolume", etc.
On the one hand, it's hard to get a detailed feature list - you have to download a PDF datasheet, and even that is less informative than most shareware sites these days. On the other hand, the website does have a lot of support information, including a good number of articles in the knowledge base and a working users' forum. It seems though EMC Retrospect uses a proprietary backup format, not standard compression format like Zip. I've used a program like that before (FileBack PC), but never liked the idea that without this specific application I was locked out of my backups. Hefty pricetag, too!
IBM Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files ($42)http://www-306.ibm.c...ous-data-protection/Now this one is very interesting. IBM Tivoli is a line of storage products that come with plenty of trailing zeros on the pricetag; this one apparently goes for forty-something dollars. (And knowing IBM, it's probably written in Java, but I'm only guessing). If it shares more than the name with other Tivoli products, it should be highly reliable. It puts an icon in the tray, but otherwise it has no interface of its own, it's configured via a browser interface. One special feature is the ability to "fork" a backup: one copy goes to a local drive, and another copy to a network drive, a NAS device, etc. Looking at the screenshots, it may not offer all the full/differential/incremental/zipped/encrypted options we are used to, but just mirrors folders in the target location, with optional versioning. It does not need the network device to be always on - acording to the description, it will wait and run the backup once the device becomes available. That's a nice touch. If it is not too resource-hungry, it could be an excellent fire-and-forget solution indeed.
The question is, can you buy it. Click "Buy now" and you're taken to a list of countries. Poland is not listed (and neither is Germany, France and most of Europe anyway), so I don't know if they are limiting sales to customers from the liksted countries only. It seems though you can pick US, then click View Pricing, and finally you can add it to cart.
(On edit: Once you add it to cart, IBM wants you to create an account. That ends in a server error. Yesterday I couldn't even get to the ordering page, which was out of service for some reason. I decided not to istall the trial until I know if IBM will let me but the darn thing
It seems you can also buy it through digitalriver:
http://tinyurl.com/2cq2js But the price there is $35, so they may be selling an earlier version, there's no way to tell on that page.
.marek
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