Posted on Apr 16, 2013 in Backup, Introduction to Backup | 0 comments

Filing it away – Evaluating file backup software – Part 3

Quick links for file backup software review:-

Overview of the contenders
Making Backups
Test 1 – Windows 7 1GB data
Test 2 – Windows 7 1GB data restored
Test 3 – Windows XP 7.56GB data
Test 4 – Windows XP 7.56GB data restored
Features at a glance
Conclusions
Comment on this article

For our next test we deleted the original copy of the data we just backed up and then restored it again using each of the backup packages in turn. We then ran a simple CRC check to verify that all files were present and undamaged.

Program	Time (mm:ss)	Notes

Acronis True Image 2010	01:46
Cobian Backup 9	N/A	Not supported – see below
Genie Backup Manager Professional 8	00:32
Oops Backup	00:33

As you can see, Genie Backup and Oops perform the best here.

Notice that there is no time given for Cobian Backup. This is because Cobian Backup does not actually support restoring files at all. Files backed up with Cobian are simply copied to another folder. This does make it easy to browse through older backups but it also makes it harder to restore files to the exact same locations they were in when the backup was taken.

For our third test, we backed up a folder containing 7.56 gigabytes of data of various types and sizes. The computer was a workstation running Windows XP Service Pack 3. Again, the CPU was a Quad Core Intel Q6600 and the backup destination was another SATA drive.