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What Happened to Genie Backup Manager?

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J-Mac:
Genie-Soft, the developers of Genie Backup Manager, have apparently abandoned that program and have changed their name to "Genie9". Not sure why since they don’t offer any products with that name. Anyway I found out about the name chage when I received some spam from them today and tried to go change/cancel my subscription with them - the one that once sent me info about Genie Backup Manager Pro releases. I found the Genie-Soft site abandoned except for their now defunct forums, and a new site called Genie9.com. And to think, I never even received any notification about the name or website address changes! (Their junk email still comes from the Genie-soft.com domain).

I used Genie Backup Manager Pro 8 for a few years. Then I started finding errors after one of their updates and I checked their forum and found that a number of users were reporting the same things there, but Genie wasn’t saying much. For a while they kept stating that this would all be fixed with Genie BU Manager 9 but the ETA for that slipped out over a year. Then they just stopped replying, in the forum and to support inquiries. I finally had to stop using Genie because of the problems. In August 2009 I found out why nothing was going on with Genie BU Manager: They had apparently been working on a new product, Genie Timeline. That's an automatic backup utility. Most GBM Pro users refused to switch because Timeline didn't offer much configurability; most settings were pre-configured and not changeable. I received occasional emails from Genie-Soft pushing Timeline; maybe every month or three.

Now today I received an email pushing "Tune-Up Utilities"! Which is not a Genie product BTW. Plus that's when I discovered that Genie-Soft is now "Genie9". Their forum is down and has been for a long time now, even though the emails still come from Genie-Soft addresses. Looks like they still offer Genie BU Manager 8 Pro and Home but no updates have been released since 2009 - the last one I had installed. So I guess that this is now officially "abandonware", since they haven't updated it in 3 years, have not responded to support inquiries in 3 years, and killed off their forum. All they want to do now is sell you a newer product and/or Tune-Up Utilities! If I can't "unsubscribe" I guess I'll be setting up a Sieve rule to send their junk mail to the spam folder.

Hate it when this happens!

Jim

f0dder:
Sad - GBM had a nice amount of configurability and acceptable GUI... and Timeline was a nice idea (never checked the implementation though... is there any similar software on Windows?).

Another one bites the dust, I guess.

J-Mac:
BackUp4All was very similar to GBM. I dropped that originally for GBM because their license was more strict. Maybe I'll check back with them.

Jim

rjbull:
I haven't tried those to compare, but SyncBack is pretty good.

J-Mac:
That's a different animal, rj. Genie and BU4A are "backups"; SyncBack is a sync program, basically creates a mirror. I already use SFFS, but as I said those aren't backup programs. I also use Acronis for images but that isn't a backup app either.

Thank you.

Jim

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