 |
CrashPlan
by gump103
Crashplan is file level backup software which allows home/business to backup files to a variety of locations in an incredibly simple process which could save irreplaceable photos, business critical documents or any other file type you can think of. It doesn't however perform disk imaging so is not to be seen as a "system ... restore" utility.
Crashplan comes in 3 versions which are:
Crashplan Free - allows backup of 1 computer to another computer on a scheduled 24 hour backup. The target for the backup can be located geographically anywhere as long as it has access to the internet. This is licensed purely as a personal use product.
Crashplan + - allows backup of 1 computer to another with extra features over the free edition. Such as almost instant backup where the folders are scanned and backed up every x minutes meaning that the backups are almost real-time. This product can be used for business purposes and costs $60usd per license.
Crashplan Pro - This is a client and server based product where you install a server side software which manages licenses, restores and backup repositories. This is designed for both corporate use and for resellers to provide backup solutions to there customers. The licenses are sold in bundles and starts at $350usd for a 5 license pack with 12 months included support.
I have used both the free and pro version of crashplan over the last 3 months. Starting out with the free product which I installed on my work computer as I had some free hard disk space and my home computer as I really wanted to get an off site backup of my photos and documents which I really wouldn't want to loose in the event of either robbery or as disaster. I all ready backup all these files to a second location in the house incise of drive failure. The install is easy and requires you to register on the crashplan website for a user account. I then used the same account on both computers and then in the client at home I could see my work pc as a backup target. I marked all the folders that I wanted to backup and started the backup. 30GB's worth of photos though were going to take a few days over the internet so I decided I would do a seeded backup where I used a portable drive as another target and backup up to that first. I then took the USB drive to work and copied the backup folder over the one created on the local hard disk. From then on crashplan only needed to perform delta backups which it has done flawlessly since. (I will explain the way crashplan performs its backups later) The internet backup runs from 12:00 midday every day and unless a large number of photos have been added it takes minutes to update the backup.
After my success with configuring the crashplan free product for home I began looking at the crashplan pro product with a view of using it for remote offsite backups of our corporate infrastructure (in particular our large file server which struggles to do a full backup over night).
I started by installing the mare server appliance on our ESX server with it pointed at a NFS share on a 4.5tb (raid 5) NAS. I then create an organisation and a user account to connect to the server so as to perform the backups.
I then installed the client on the file server and connected it to the crashplan server. I selected the 2 drives that needed to be backed up and told crashplan to backup every 15 minutes. I then started the backup and after about 14 hours the full backup was complete, and from then on the server would take snapshots every 15 minutes. The NAS box was then moved to a remote site so as to provide a restorable location in the event of a failure.
We have since purchased licenses for crashplan (25 seats on educational licensing) for around £1500 and have applied them to several SQL servers and other database servers.
The interface for crashplan is really simple and easy to use. Once installed a service runs when ever the machine is turned on and that controls the backup regardless of whether the user is logged on or not. When logged on a task tray icon is visible and indicates the status of the backups. If the icon is pulsing and green then a backup is occurring, amber means that the backup hasn't performed in a user defined number of days and if the icon is red then the backup hasn't occurred in an even longer user defined number of days. Double clicking on the icon brings up the crashplan interface which is a tabbed interface. The tabs are backup, restore, settings, history and destinations. Each of these tabs are pretty self explanatory and provides access to the required functions.
The pro server interface is slightly different in that it is web based but the essential functionality and simple layout is maintained and provides a comfortable environment to work within. Special mention can be made to the reporting functions of the server where it provides a graph showing the growth of the backups as well as informing you as to the average growth over the last months so you can plan if storage is due to run out.
Crashplan backups differ from the usual backup methods where a full backup is taken and then differential backups are taken until the next full backup is taken. Crashplan only ever needs to do one full backup of a drive and from then on it only takes byte level different ional backups (delta changes) of the files. This allows the backups to run really quickly as only the changes made to a file are backed up. This process means that it can (in the pro and + versions) be set to backup every 10-15 minutes and capture almost real time backups of the files.
Backups are also compressed before they are sent from the computer to the server/remote computer so network bandwidth is reduced and the amount of space used is significantly reduced. On top of this the pro version of crashplan also does a process known as de-duplication which finds files that are the same in 2 folders and only creates one backup with a pointer to the other file location incise a restore is needed.
Both wan bandwidth and CPU usage can be throttled on machines to prevent them crashplan causing performance issues, in the case of the file server which is backing up during the day this is important as you don't want users to see performance problems.
In the case of our servers we have been backing up 400 GB of data now for just over 2 months (nightly backups for databases) and the entire crashplan archive takes up less than 250 GB in total.
Restores can be performed with ease in all versions of the product by going to the application on either the client, target or server and choosing the restore option. You can then choose to restore the files by date and time, to original location of a separate location at either folder or file level. This is done really easily by all of the interfaces.
If a restore is large you can choose to copy the encrypted backed up folder on to a removable storage device and take it to the restore destination, add the folder to the crashplan app and restore from there in the same way as the network version.
Both crashplan free and crashplan + have the option to purchase storage from crashplan them selves at a cost of $50usd for 50 GB of storage. The downside to this type of backup is that the files will be held in the US and as such a full restore would take several days (depending on connection speed) to recovered.
In all I really like crashplan, it's a simple product that uses a bunch of clever features to allow backups to become an easy thing to manage and deal with.
Read the complete review |
 |
Symantec Norton 360
by godsman
Norton Internet Security - over priced and just a constant nuisance, but better than having those pesky viruses which are so easy to get.
Defends agains a broad raneg of threats, including spyware and viruses.
Transaction secutiry safeguards you against online identity theft.
Back up and restore - gives ... you a certain memory block dedicated to backup and restore so you dont lose your important files.
Pc tuneup - makes your computer tweaked and keeps your computer running at top performance at all times.
1 year protection for upto 3 PCs per household for around £70.
Sounds brilliant doesnt it, dont be completely fooled though.
I bought this having previously used Norton, and getting it offered for £30 with my new laptop, however i feel its a constant nuisance asking me to do things and it seems to slow my computer down as well, as it is always using processor power.
THe online storage where you can back up important files is also only 2GB which i dont find very enough, so i use a portable hard drive for back ups instead.
Firewall protection worked well and automatics updates are constantly being released, however this means your computer seems to be constantly installing and downloading these new updates. Slightly annoying.
However Norton is a good brand and does what it says, but look out there is just as good protection out there for less than £70. Try and get Norton in special offer periods.
Read the complete review |
|
|
Acronis True Image Home 11
by boredindunoon
Acronis True Image 11 is a disc imaging software package that's designed with the noble aim of backing up the contents of your computer. From photographs and music files, to actual applications and emails, True Image claims to do it all easily and quickly, while also giving you peace of mind.
As well as providing a backup ... solution for pretty much everything you can think off including any user settings you may have, the software gives you the ability to roll back an installation of software that's causing problems (for example a game you've installed). Include in the software are security and privacy tools that clean up your computer and erase your tracks such as cookies.
Sounds like a dream doesn't it?
Sadly it was more like a nightmare.
Installing the software on my computer with Window Vista (64-bit) couldn't have been more difficult. It took four attempts between complete freeze up's and error messages. When the software finally installed, it couldn't see my second internal hard drive (which is identical to my master drive in brand, capacity, and specifications.) No matter what I attempted the software refused to believe it's existence. I wasn't the greatest failing, there isn't much on that hard drive so I was willing to let it pass. However my problems with the software were just getting started. Included in the software are some security and privacy tools that did absolutely nothing on my computer. They said they were doing something such as deleting history in Internet Explorer, but when I checked the history would still be there. The so called File Shredder is less useful than a empty swimming pool (metaphors were never my strong point) it doesn't even delete the files that it's meant to be making 'unrecoverable' from your desktop.
The software interface isn't the easiest to understand nor use, and can be tricky to confirm backups the way that you want.
Three days after installing True Image I switched on my computer to be bombarded with a number of error messages along the lines of "File Not Found" it didn't take me long to work out that the software had somehow become corrupt. I attempted to do a repair installation without much luck, so I had to do a system restore to remove the software (ironic considering that's what this software was designed to do) followed by a registry clean up, and finally a complete fresh installation of the software (which only took two attempts this time around). However it didn't solve any of my problems.
I did consider the possibility that it was me that was doing something wrong, or something on my computer such as Ghost Surf for example was interfering with the software so I decided to email their technical support and detailed the problems that I was having. That was more than two weeks ago and I'm still waiting on a replay.
I did like the "try and decide" option, which is a software safeguard that allows you to try new or potentially damaging software out on your computer while giving you the option to discard any changes at any time. This worked well and I found it especially useful because I still tend to play a lot of older computer games such as Star Craft or Cyber Storm. Such games can cause problems when you have to start playing around with system settings, and in some cases installing emulators, but you can try them out risk free.
The software claims to be Vista compatible, but with so many problems it's hard to imagine it being any more difficult or useless. Maybe despite the fact that my computer works perfectly it just didn't like something I was running in the back ground. For all I know it could have been my Internet Security Suite that was causing some of the problems but I personally doubt it. Without a replay from Technical Support there is no way to be sure, if the problems lie within the software or not.
However considering the problems, the time I've spent, and how valuable your computers contents can be, I can't in my right mind recommend this product to you despite it having one useful feature.
I've you're looking for a backup solution then look somewhere else. In the mean time I've reverted to copying and pasting anything I want to back up over to my external hard drive. Not an ideal method but far better and more to the point safer than this.
(I'm a reviewer on Amazon, and some my reviews are copied from there to dooyoo. Please feel free to check out my Amazon profile under my real name of Mr Andrew M Kerr.)
Read the complete review |
