Premier Software Reviews & Technology in the News

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Good morning readers!

These days, one would hope that any user has come to realize the importance of backing up their files. It's a security measure that no-one can afford to be without - it also brings peace of mind to the person who has important and/or sensitive files to protect from being lost - especially ones that the user considers to be irreplaceable.

Developer: East Technologies

Supported Languages: English.

System Requirements: Windows Vista/XP/2000/Me/NT/'98/Windows Server 2003.

Additional Requirements: 300 MHz or higher processor; 128 MB of RAM; 10 MB of hard disk space

Tested on: Windows XP Pro.
All back-up programs of which I'm aware, have the ability to set restore points, giving the user the ability to return to that point if something untoward should happen on the user's computer, such as file corruption; accidental file deletion and other unknown issues.

In general, back-ups should also have the ability to protect the user's program settings; registry files and any other files that are important to you - so let's see how well East-Tec Backup performs.

GUI (graphical user interface:)

As the program launches, a visually pleasing interface appears (first image,) giving you the options of: Backup; My tasks; Restore and Quick Tour.

Functions seem easy for the inexperienced user, by the use of wizards.

Upon launch, an icon immediately appeared in the tray, enabling right-click to access much of the program.

Options:

Clicking on options first, the user is presented with four types: General Settings; Email Settings; FTP connections; Masks and Logs.

Going through each one, I could see that the software was extremely configurable and changed certain options to suit my own tastes, thereby ensuring that I knew the program would run and perform as I wished it to run. Too many people blame software for not performing as expected, only to find that they didn't have the options configured correctly, for their own expected result.

General Options:

Here you decide whether or not you want the program to:

• Launch with start-up;
  
  
• Associate all task files with East-Tec Backup;
  
  
• Delay launching for n minutes after start-up.

You can also decide:

• Where you want your temporary files stored;
  
  
• What you'd prefer the task priority to be.

Settings:

This is where you enter your:

Outgoing SMTP server and port;

SMTP server login and password;

The rest are defaults, which allows the program to email you about any events, including issues. (See features below.)

You then send a test email, just to ensure that you have your settings correct.

FTP Connections:

As the subtitle implies, this is where you enter your FTP connection details. Once done, you will be able to quickly load them again when creating new tasks to a remote location. Nice and handy indeed.

Masks:

For those new to such terminologies; think of it as a mask you might wear to a party - it hides your face .. right? Well this works in the same way. Entering certain file extensions (as filename masks,) that you don't want included in the back-up process; will cause the program to ignore any files with the same extensions. There's absolutely no point in backing up files that you don't particularly want to keep, such as temp., files.

Logs:

This is the last option and allows you to enter a file path where you'd like the program logs to be stored; whether or not you want them timestamped and finally, to what size you'd like to limit the log file sizes.

Quick Tour:

I took the Quick Tour, which is conveniently located within the help file. This shows users how to manage their own back-up tasks (run; edit; view; add files and identify status;) restore points from previous back-ups; and create syncronization tasks.

As with many back-up utilities, you're able to set automatic back-ups and schedule certain other tasks that you want to run regularly. This gives the user peace of mind - although with my current back-ups, I still check the results every now and then, to ensure that the program is still working well and hasn't experienced any issues, preventing it from working as it should.

No-one should blindly trust any software, without checking it from time to time, to ensure it's ongoing integrity.

If you back up to CDs/DVDs, it's a general recommendation that they are stored off-site - that means, other than your home. If you were to have a fire - there would go all your data; settings and anything else that you specifically care about on your computer. Just think how devastated you'd be, if you lost all your financial information! What would you do at tax time?

Somehow, you'd have to attempt to recreate all the information you had in there, once you reinstalled your tax program. This was just an example - but I wanted to show you how extreme, losing your data can be.

Other dire losses, could be:

• Loss of your password manager;
  
  
• Project information;
  
  
• Powerpoint presentations;
  
  
• Cooking database;
  
  
• All your music/photo/scrapbooking files;
  
  
• All your music/graphic converters; just to name a few!

• Chat logs (some people love to keep these;)

I listed these because I know that people who don't think they need to back-up - often don't see the big picture, or scope of what can be lost.

Help File:

Very comprehensive; layed out well and very easy to understand. Even the absolute novice could navigate their way to finding the information they seek.

Features:

According to the documentation, once you set up your email information, the program will automatically notify you of errors; warnings and summaries of the executed task. I'll be testing this later. My current back-up program doesn't have this ability, so in my opinion, that's a real plus for East-Tec;

• Not only does it back-up important files; photographs; and music - but it will also back-up your emails; address book and program settings. Not bad at all. Not that you have to back-up ALL your programs and settings, just the ones that truly matter to you;

• The encryption algorithim used, is military strength - 256 bit AES. It's not likely that any hacker would be able to break this code if you happen to have a breach of security on your computer. If they can, our military is in deep ...... trouble;

• You're able to back-up to any media: hard disks; CDs/DVDs; USB sticks; network, or to chosen internet locations. However, I do discourage the latter. Backing up to a file storage facility on the internet, while handy, can be disastrous for the user. It's not unknown for such companies to go under and not notify their members. If this were to happen to you, you'd be left with no back-up files whatsoever;

• If you choose to back-up to a USB stick, be careful there also. Loss of the USB stick, would constitute the same dangers as storing online. Personally, I wouldn't choose either of these methods - well perhaps the latter if I was planning on immediately going over to a friend or relative, to store the back-up with them;

• You're also able to automatically compress your files after the backup is finished. Unfortunately the compression method used in East-Tec Backup is the zip format - which restricts you to 4 Gig;

• The restore function is excellent and worked exactly as expected;

• Back up without the need to close running programs;

• Run programs/commands before or after the backup.

Negatives:

• I didn't see any mention on their website, or in their documentation, as to whether or not the program would back up to tape;

• After I configured my first task (full backup,) I saw that I had 16 Gig to back-up and wondered what would happen if I chose compression, knowing that the program uses .zip. My current back-up program, has the ability to split the backup over two or three zip files.

Result:

The bad news is: that it came up with an error and stopped the entire process. More bad news is: that even though my earlier test email had worked perfectly, the program didn't notify me that the back-up hadn't worked. After double checking my options, there's no reason that I could see, why this didn't happen.

The worrisome thing about this, is that should you somehow miss the fact that the program hadn't done its thing - it could go without any intervention and you'd be thinking that your files and programs are all safe - when they're not. If you use this program, you must remember the 4 Gig limit on compression and somehow work around it.

Two ways to accomplish this, are to either:

• Reduce the number of files and programs you want to back-up (disappointing;)
  
  
• Manually split your back-ups between two tasks.
  

This sounds like a lot of tedious, unnecessary work, when a few other backup programs can quite adequately handle this issue by choosing different methods for compression. Having said this, you need to remember that if your hard drive uses FAT32 formatting, you'd still be limited to creating files larger than 4 Gig, regardless of whether or not the compression utility is supposed to be able to create larger files. This is a limitation of Windows. Unfortunately, this size isn't even nearly adequate for the business environment of today.

This does not make East-Tec Backup 2007 itself unworthy, it was just an unfortunate choice of compression method to include in this software.

However, if your hard drive happens to be NTFS formatted - lucky you - then there isn't any file size limitation. You can do more reading on FAT32 and NTFS on the PC Guide website.

Points:

• Originality: 4/10

• Functionality: 7/10

• Intuitiveness: 8/10

Price: US$39.95

At this point, I feel that the current price is a little high. However, once the compression is improved, then the equation quickly becomes:
worth x price = satisfaction.

Summary:

For smaller back-up needs, East-Tec Backup 2007 is an excellent choice and does backup and restore without a hitch. Just keep an eye on the file size size that you need to back-up.

There are dozens of compression utilities available and not all are restricted to 4 Gig. For example: One of the industry standards Stuffit Deluxe allows you to choose from any of 20 different compression formats. Another file compression utility example is PeaZip; which can split and join files and compress executables with strip/UPX. It's also open source, which I will actively support.

Please do back-up your files, even if you think you don't need to do so. One day you might find out that you've lost something of extreme value to you. For example: My mother died last year and I will cherish her emails always. I'd be devastated to lose them.

Customer Support:

I have communicated with Alexandra Preda in the past, and I believe that they are looking for alternative compression methods, in which case they'll come up out with a patch. I think at the moment they're looking at: ZIP64 which is now utilized in Vista.

At any time that I've had anything to do with Alexandra, my impression was that she seems committed to keeping East-Tec's customers happy and queries are answered within reasonable time.

I have also swapped emails with George Pecherle and found him to be incredibly diligent in his job - even following up with me on an issue I had, when he hadn't heard anything back from me about it.

Recommendation:

East-Tec Backup 2007 is recommended for basic back-up needs until the patch comes through, at which time I'd also recommend it for higher volume business use.

A workaround to make East-Tec Backup absolutely worthy even for business needs, would be to turn off compression in your options. Once the back-up has completed, compress the files with another compression/encryption utility such as PeaZip, that will split your files during the compression process, if necessary.

I'll quickly mention that East Technologies has a download link on their website for a trial version. Why not take them on their offer?

Well there we are again - another review completed. :)

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Remember to back-up!
~ Swan