So after the dismal failure of Acronis, I tried another backup solution: a product called Backup Maker from ASCOMP Software. It had gotten some nice reviews, so I figured I'd try the free version and see if it was worth the upgrade.
I set it up to run overnight, according to their instructions. Unfortunately, when I came in to the office this morning, I found a couple of warning messages from Backup Maker saying that it was unable to backup a couple of Norton files.
Too bad: backup software that's supposed to run unattended shouldn't be displaying messages and waiting for an operator to respond. Figuring that I might have made a setup error and assuming that the backup program was now running happily in the background, I decided to go check on what it was doing and make sure that the settings were correct.
Too bad again: Backup Maker had completely stopped, complaining that it didn't have enough space on the backup volume that I had pointed to and it hadn't done anything. This in spite of the fact that there was over 400 Gigabytes of free space on that volume!
I also tried out a product call Synchronicity (by Create Software) which can be found on SourceForge, a major repository of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS, to some). It didn't take me long to dump that one as well, The only way I could find to define backups was one folder at a time, rather than being able to select multiple directories from a file tree. And that was way too time-consuming. Maybe the option was buried in there somewhere, but I sure didn't want to take the time to find out. If new software isn't reasonably intuitive to me, I just drop it and move on.
So, two more backup programs byte the dust.
How hard can it be to write a backup program that just works?
I haven't used it much myself and I don't know if it works on windows 7 but friends of mine have recommended Yadis to me in the past. -jon
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