Hi,
From appearances Genie Backup Professional looks more like their regular backup software (similar to Backup4All) while this Timeline looks like it is more designed to "help" you by working with where it thinks your important files may be. If that is so, then Timeline is not of interest here, since I like to put stuff in its own place and then decide how to backup. Do I have the distinction right ?
Steven
-Steven Avery
Timeline is meant as continuous backup - will run in the background and backup what you told it to backup constantly as it changes, when your backup device is accessible. Incrementally, keeping versions.
Compared to a normal backup solutions it has the following differences:
- does not run on a schedule but constantly. Its checks can run on an interval (every 5 minutes) or on detection of changes. It does have a game mode and a power/battery saving mode, which is better than quite a few always-on backup options
- there's only 1 backup set and 1 backup target, rather than the option of multiple backup profiles (at least in home version). This is quite limiting if you come from a tool where you had created many profiles with different frequencies and logic.
- it has a local browse client that allows to browse backed up versions from windows explorer, as well as browse by timeline and search (by name) files in the timeline vault
- it could be quite greedy of disk space, at least the home version
You control what it backs up, within certain bounds
* It does have preselect options for backup, for things like your windows system (that does back up a lot), email, images etc. that are preconfigured sets with locations and file filters. It calls this "smart selection". I havent investigated this much but this looks like a reasonable set of choices: disaster recovery, email, desktop, documents, office files, financial files, local iphone files, local blackberry files, pictures, music, videos, bookmarks, ebooks, compressed files and iso images. This is a "quick start" option
* You can skip these and go to "my computer" and select folders and files. If you select a whole folder, new files and subfolders in it will automatically be added. There is only 1 global file filter available to exclude files by extension/name for the whole set of manually selected files and folders
* the backed up files are in a folder on the target drive that has a slightly opaque name, but once in it you have a tree of files that mirrors your own + a separate set of versions. So normal files could be retrieved without installing the software again.
It is not necessarily the right backup if you are a pro and have lots of varied backup/sync needs. It is a neat backup for installing on machines where you don't want (and don't need) to think too much, for other people in your household/family/client circle who will not backup and not think of backup unless it it terribly easy, of the "plug this particular USB drive in at least twice a week and the rest is automatic" variety
It seems it can email regular reports too (I liked that in the early Genie Backup tool) but I havent enabled this.
If you have the disk space, it looks like it can keep a history of snapshots for rolling back in a way that might be easier to grasp for normal users than some of the rollback/images tools. I havent tested that bit much, maybe I should since I have gotten lazy on the backup image making. But now I just use it for files and folders and outlook for all the files and documents that don't need sync.
I haven't tested it as much as I should, though.
(pic is of the restore interface)
