Hm, can't make up my mind with regards to purchasing Genie Timeline or not.
I'm near the end of my trial period, and so far it has been pretty satisfactory. It doesn't bog down my machine (admittedly, that
would be a pretty awesome feat after my latest upgrade
![tongue :P](https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/Smileys/fun/tongue.gif)
), and I really like the no-nonsense simple GUI and the multiple backups. I've pointed it a my fileserver and let it use 50 gigabytes storage, which is enough for quite a few versions of my most important data.
So, what's holding me back?
First, two relatively minor points, that still nag me somewhat.
1) the structure of the backups. Poking around there just looks... weird. OTOH, rather than 100% opaque binary blobs, there's a bunch of individually zipped up versions - plus special storage for files with very long path/filenames, and some bookkeeping database stuff. Would be a pain to extract stuff by hand, but seems doable. The structure also does seem to be relatively wasteful... then again, it makes for fast restore of individual versions.
2) the use of an explorer shell extension for the timeline explorer. I really, really, don't think that's the best way to implement this... also, the UI for this is a bit too simplistic, offering only home/end, prev/next and some 'dots' you can click - there's no decent overview of or way to select based on dates.
3) restore seems relatively slow - seems like traversing their version-database/whatever might not be designed the best way in the world (actual file restoration after the "preparing data" step seemed to run at fine speed). And this is after the 30-day trial period - I have no idea whether the "preparing data" step will take even longer as more versions are accumulated?
4) trying to con you into "extended download support" and adding whatever unrelated crap. I know there's a fair amount of online stores doing this, but it's still damn cheesy. (That's the shop on Curt's link, btw, not the official(?) genie9 store).
I can live with the above flaws, but they do nag me a bit. And I haven't found another piece of backup software that runs unobtrusively in the background and does local, versioned, on-modified backups.
Now, there's a few other things that, when added to the above points, makes me queasy.
1) the "tweet about this" and "like us on facebook" buttons in the main UI. Like, WTF? Sure, have those on your webpage if you must - but in the program UI? Tacky.
2) "but where did the forums go?"
3) genie-software/genie9's history of not updating their software for ages.
4) the genie9 blog... like, W-T-MEGA-F? Why the heck is a backup software company blogging about smartphone apps, Nikon kameras, tablets and stuff? The blog seems like a mix of somehow-revenue-generating links and stuff that really doesn't have anything to do with backup (olympics 2012, for instance).
So I don't really know. I haven't found any other backup software that I really like, but the company seems dodgy. What to do?
They currently have a 35% off summer sale, but Curt's link also seems to work (at least up until you enter your CC information, haven't gone through with it) - dunno if there's any differences between the Pro version there and the Pro version on their site?
*sigh*. Why can't these things ever be easy?