Acronis kindly notified me that they’re having a back-to-school sale on Acronis True Image Home 2010. Act now and you can get it for $29.99 instead of $49.99.

I haven’t tried the home version of True Image—or not for some years—but the Ur-Guru swears by the Workstation version, which he installed on my new laptop. I haven’t had to restore from it yet, which is the real acid test, but it creates backups speedily and effectively.

PS. Nope, I have no financial relationship with Acronis, though if they were to offer me one, I might accept it.

At the beginning of June, I got a new computer. It was high time: Enna is more than four years old now, and she’s pretty sluggish, and Windows XP is getting just a tiny bit outdated, though I preferred it to Vista.

The new machine is a thing of beauty: a 17.3” ASUS G72GX with 6 GB RAM and a bunch of other drool-inspiring specs, plus flash gamer details like a backlit keyboard (the Ur-Guru especially liked that one) and a glowing blue Republic of Games logo on the back. Seen in the sunlight (a rare occurrence), the paint reflects blue sparkles.

And, of course, it comes with a whole new operating system: Windows 7. So far I quite like it, but it’s a big jump from XP, and I’ve just checked Windows 7 Annoyances: Tips, Secrets, and Solutions (affiliate link) out of the library to help me find my way around.

The new OS isn’t the only reason to re-evaluate my existing backup system. Enna had two physical 80 GB drives, C and D. I used the C drive for both programs and data/documents, and backed up data and documents from the C drive to the D drive using SyncBack Freeware. I also backed the C drive up to both a USB drive (Ruby) using Karen’s Replicator and to a NAS drive (Teratides) using the built-in Maxtor backup software. I backed the D drive up to my Buffalo Quattro (Qualora) using SyncBack, and likewise backed Ruby up to my second NAS drive, Lachesis. (Confused yet? I posted a map in February 2009, when I was still using Freya instead of Ruby.)

The new machine, Auset (that’s how scholars think Egyptians pronounced the name of the goddess we know as Isis), has one drive of 500 GB. It’s partitioned into a recovery area (50 GB, no drive letter) , the C drive (116 GB) for the operating system and program files, and the D drive (334 GB) for my data.

There would be no point backing up from my C drive to my D drive on Auset, because they’re actually the same hardware. Backups all have to go somewhere else. On the other hand, the new folder structure has made my Replicator Jobs List very short. Instead of a dozen separate jobs backing up different folders, I only have to back up the “data” folder and the “docs” folder to appropriate places on Ruby, and all the subfolders will take care of themselves.

I’m going to have to add at least one more job, I think, unless I can persuade Microsoft that it really doesn’t want to keep any documents on the C drive. (I did figure out how to set the “Docs” folder on D:\ as the default location in the library, even though I’m not really sure what this library business is about.)

I won’t say any more about Replicator here because I’ve written about this handy free tool ad infinitum, starting in 2004.

I also decided to check out the new Windows 7 Backup and Restore program. It’s been a long time since I looked at Windows Backup—probably not since my first days with XP. It left rather a lot to be desired at that point. I figured it was worth checking out, even though the Ur-Guru had already set me up with Acronis Backup & Recovery 10 for disk images. (I’ll talk about that in detail in a future post.)

You can find Windows Backup and Restore in the control panel—at least, you can if you switch to the icon view. If you view the control panel by category, you may be hunting around for a while.

As you can see (at least if you click through to the full-size version of this image), when I went  in to inspect, I found that my last backup hadn’t completed. This was probably because I’d elected to make a system image but not turned off all my programs when running the backup. (Oops.) I changed my settings to leave out the system image (it’s that checkbox down at the bottom.)

Then I shut down all my programs anyway, just to be safe. Some things, like your Outlook PST file and your Quicken data, can’t be backed up while the program is running. You can schedule automatic backups, but if they’re going to work, you have to remember to have those programs shut down at that time.

This time the backup completed successfully, and in a fairly short period of time. If I want to restore only some of the files, I can click the “browse for files” button after clicking the “restore my files” button.

Note: the “Recover system settings” option sends you to System Restore.

(Notice that it does versioning, since it offers you multiple dates to restore the files to.)

Once you pick a file to restore, you get a choice of destinations:

And then (if you’re just testing, and didn’t actually lose the file) you get the Win 7 file overwrite dialog:

What the heck, at least it’s prettier than the Windows XP version of the same message, as well as having one more option.

As backup programs go, this one has come a long way since the first time I looked at the built-in Windows Backup tool. I haven’t tested the system image against other imaging tools (perhaps I’ll include that in the Acronis writeup next issue), but as file backup programs go, it’s perfectly adequate. It doesn’t have the flexibility of a SyncBack, where I can create several jobs and schedule them to run on system idle, but an initial examination suggests it’s the equal of several products I’ve covered here.

And just to make me glad I had backups, less than a month after I’d bought her, Auset experienced the Black Screen of Death. When I turned her on, nothing happened. No drive light. No drive sounds. Nothing on the screen. I mean, nothing. Naturally I panicked and called the Ur-Guru, while digging out the info I’d need for a warranty return. (We—he—found the solution, which was to unplug the machine, remove the battery, and press the power button for 45 seconds.) Throughout the whole harrowing scenario, there was one comforting thought: at least I had backups.

Well, this is embarrassing.

The last time I wrote my so-called weekly column was more than a month ago. And, believe me, it’s not because nothing has been happening in the world of backups. Life got just a bit out of hand and blogging slipped down the priority list. But now the Ur-Guru has gone home, the cats have settled in, the housemate situation is more or less sorted out, and I really have no excuses left. It’s time to wade in and deal with all those outstanding backup issues from the last 6 weeks so we can get back to our regularly scheduled program of product reviews and tales from the backup trenches.

• To start with, our winner (and only entrant) in the Gladinet contest is Todd Vierling. Todd told an entertaining if manifestly apocryphal story about how Microsoft’s Azure Blob got its name.
• I missed a pre-briefing on the new KineticD service from Data Deposit Box, so I’m following up on that.
• Mozy launched Mozy 2.0 for Windows. According to the press release, “New enhancements include faster upload speeds and decreased bandwidth usage, new convenience and access features, and Mozy 2xProtect™ – a new feature which allows Mozy users to back up to a local external drive in addition to Mozy’s online data centers at no additional cost.” Could this be in response to Dmailer’s move into the online space? I haven’t had a chance to ask Mozy. Meanwhile, I guess Mac users are still stuck with the 1.0 version until the developers catch up.
• I got a link request from BackupTechnology in  England. As it happened, I’d just installed their Online Backup for WordPress plugin on a client’s site and was about to try it. I’ve since set it up, and it backs up on schedule; I haven’t tested the restore function. Look for a more detailed review soon. (Though I might not do the restore test on a client site.)
• There’s a new beta version of the Automatic WordPress Backup plugin. It now runs a nice little diagnostic of your server when you activate it. It still doesn’t seem very fond of my test blog on Dreamhost, though, so I may have to test it on a different host. (I admit to not being very fond of Dreamhost myself.)
• Amazon S3 introduced something called Reduced Redundancy Storage. It lets you prioritize your data so you save fewer copies of less important stuff, thus taking up less space. Prices start at $.10 per gigabyte and go down (per gigabyte) from there.
• Gladinet came out with a new product called CloudAFS (attached file storage). On the face of it, it sounds like the kind of enterprise product that most readers of this blog wouldn’t be interested in: “CloudAFS allows local storage to be used as tier one for fast access and delivers unprecedented storage space by using the cloud as tier two. If you have storage expansion needs, want to replace a tape backup solution or just want to leverage the efficiencies of cloud computing, you can now attach cloud storage to your existing IT infrastructure to create a cost-effective, multi-tiered storage solution with low impact and faster backup or recovery times.” But if you use a server at all for your business, you might check it out, since it’s only $4.99/month for a single license, and there are bulk discounts.
• I got another link request from ProFusion Backups. I’d feel a bit better about them if they hadn’t left their fill-in-the-blank template below the part they filled out for the FileSlinger™ Backup Blog. I’m willing to take a look at it, but it won’t be first on my list.
• Our friends at the Windows Azure Blob are now charging for their formerly free service. (Well, the introductory offer is still listed despite the fact that July 1 has passed, but that’s probably an oversight.) We knew they would someday. My only use for them was to test Gladinet; Windows Azure is trickier to use than Amazon S3. The prices are very similar, however:
  • $0.15 per GB for data transfers from European and North American locations
  • $0.20 per GB for data transfers from other locations
  • $0.01 per 10,000 transactions
• Andy from CloudBerry Lab wrote to tell me that CloudBerry had upgraded its online backup product to include support for Amazon’s Reduced Redundancy Storage (see above). They also have a beta version of CloudBerry for Azure Blob Storage. That product is free while in beta, even though Azure Blob no longer is.
• iConfidential asked for a review of their cloud storage/file sharing/backup product by posting a comment to the announcement about Dmailer’s contest. I deleted the comment, but I’ll probably review the product eventually. (Look, folks, if you want me to review something, read the Review Policy page and then e-mail me.)
• BackupBuddy also got an upgrade and can now store your backups on Amazon S3. I did that with my backup of this blog before upgrading it to WordPress 3.0. I haven’t had any problems with the other dozen upgrades I’ve done to WP 3.0, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to back up the site, which uses a lot of plugins and an older (relatively speaking) theme. It worked like a charm, including the upload, which I checked on with S3Fox. (Sorry, Andy, but that was handiest.) Even though GoDaddy, the host I still have the Backup Blog on, doesn’t have its servers set up properly to use the magic restore function that makes BackupBuddy the Holy Grail of WordPress backup plugins, the backup still contains absolutely everything in a nice handy zip file, and I could if necessary unzip it and restore it manually.
• Amazon Web Services finally got around to adding Amazon S3 to its AWS Management Console, so you can see what’s in your buckets without a third-party tool. Good of them.
• I’ve been getting lots of e-mail from Zetta about their enterprise storage-as-a-service. They charge $0.25/GB/month and there’s a 15-day free trial—the kind you have to provide a credit card for. Another thing to follow up on. Maybe I could get them and Data Deposit Box in the same room to duke it out.
• My former client Spare Backup seems to have landed a $10 million equity line, because they’re publishing press releases about it.
• I have a new computer. Expect to start hearing about Windows 7 soon.

Whew! That took me more than an hour just to list. (I did have to check a few links.) Actually testing the new products is going to take longer. But I promise to be back next week to tell you about my initial experiences backing up on my new computer.

A couple of weeks ago a representative of Dmailer contacted me with information about their forthcoming, still-under-embargo release of a free version of their software that would also include 2 GB of free online storage. Because I have a bit of editorial backlog on this blog, it was not difficult to keep this news under wraps until after the official March 23rd announcement.

Dmailer is a French company (though the name is pronounced “Dee-mailer,” at least by English-speaking users), and the only person I know who uses their software is my colleague Lee Hopkins in Australia. When I posted a request for someone to write about it, quite some time back, no one responded, and by this time I’d stopped ever expecting to hear anything from Dmailer themselves. But with this push into the crowded online backup market, they clearly want as much coverage as they can get, in as many markets as possible.

Like Mozy, Dmailer gives you 2 GB free online backup. Unlike Mozy, Dmailer also gives you a full-featured offline backup product, Dmailer Backup v3.

There are definitely advantages to being able to use the same software for your online and offline backups. Fewer programs to install and manage. Less space taken up on your hard drive by those programs. Just one interface to get to know. Less likelihood that the two will interfere with one another. And, perhaps the most important for the “set it and forget it” generation (which is most of us, given the option)—no extra steps to take to make sure you have both local and online backups covered, at least not once you’ve signed up for your online backup account.

In theory, anyway.

Installing Dmailer Backup v3 was easy. The user interface is attractive and easy to understand, and leads you through each of the steps, giving you several options along the way.

First, you choose your installation location: “Dmailer Backup must be installed on an external storage drive.” The program recognizes both USB and network storage as well as secondary internal disks. I chose the USB drive with the most available space on it for the test.

Next, Dmailer asks whether you want automatic, continuous backup of certain folders, or to choose what to back up. I chose to customize, but novice users will find that automatic option extremely comforting and convenient.

If you’re customizing your backups, you can do so both by file location and by file type. Personally, I don’t need my desktop backed up (nothing there but a very few shortcuts; I don’t know why people clutter their desktops with folders), but I do want my Outlook data copied. (Note that “e-mail messages” is not an option under “file types”—if you want your e-mail backed up, you have to back up the folder where it gets stored.)

Then there are the Backup Settings. The one to watch out for here is “Live Backup” That means Dmailer runs in the background and backs files up continuously as you change them. For some types of files and some people, this is great. It’s the essence of continuous data protection.

For me, on the other hand, it’s trouble. There are some kinds of files you can’t back up while they’re open, notably Quicken data files and Outlook data files. And then there’s what happens if you’re running a continuous backup program while you’re recording audio or video. The computer overloads and freezes, or at least that’s what happened to me with Memeo Instant Backup. So I turn that feature off, because I can’t count on remembering to turn the backup program off when I need to record something, and I can put a shortcut to the program in the Startup folder so I get a backup whenever I boot my system, which is often enough for me.

Once I’d been through all these options, I saved the backup job and started backing up.

The program works pretty quickly; it copied my 12.7 GB of files over in an hour.

Despite offering versioning and password protection, Dmailer doesn’t use any kind of proprietary format to store your backups, so you can just drag a file back from the backup folder to restore it. Or you can use the restore wizard to restore as many or as few of those files as you want.

The next step after local backup is online backup, but for some reason I ran into trouble here. Even though I filled in all the fields, read the EULA and clicked the button to say I had, I kept getting an error when I tried to create an account.

I tried with a different e-mail account; same result. Tried logging in on the website in case the error message was a mistake; no luck. I figured it would take forever to hear back from support, because it’s Easter Weekend.

When I re-started Dmailer a bit later and filled in the product registration information, however, I was suddenly able to create an online account. Maybe that was the missing link, or maybe whatever was glitching got fixed.

Success bred its own problems, however. Dmailer suddenly sucked up all my CPU cycles as it began running the online backup—before I had even configured it. Which was a big oops, since I needed to specify a much smaller subset of folders to back up online in order to stay within that 2 GB limit. But unless you click “Advanced Settings,” Dmailer will use the same backup definitions for your online backup as for your offline backup.

I eventually managed to fight my way through to the settings I wanted, apply them, turn off the “start online backups automatically” option, stop the backup that was in process, and start over again. I then clicked the “Go Online” button to see whether I could remove anything that I hadn’t wanted backed up.

This, fortunately, is perfectly possible. Just click those little blue drop-down arrows and select “Delete” if you want to get rid of something. (You also have the option to download it, so you can restore the file to a computer without the Dmailer software installed, or to share it.)

Upload speeds are not what I’d call record-setting, but they’re certainly no slower than Mozy. It wouldn’t hurt Dmailer to add in an option that let you determine how much of the computer’s resources to dedicate to the backup, however. I know Enna is getting on in years and her RAM and processor aren’t impressive by 2010 standards, but given the length of time any online backup usually takes, it’s a good idea to be able to relegate it to the background and get on with other things, unless you plan to run it overnight.

Minor issues aside, however, Dmailer Online Backup looks like a viable alternative to Mozy Home Free, combined with a solid offline backup tool. Whether it will scale as well as the EMC-owned Mozy remains to be seen, but if you don’t have an online backup solution yet, this is a good place to start.

Don’t worry, Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.1 Free Edition really is free. And it is a backup and recovery tool. But I’m not sure I would call it a paragon among programs of its kind, even though Paragon Software Group has been developing it for 15 years now.

Unlike many backup products, which are designed to back up your files, Paragon concentrates on creating images of your hard drive. If your drive crashes and you have to replace it, you can insert the recovery CD (or memory stick), follow the directions, and restore the image. Presto! You have everything back: operating system, software, and data.

I mostly find that while it’s nice to have an image of a recently-installed machine with all the software, and while I’m going to want a drive image before attempting anything really strange and tricky, and certainly before reinstalling the computer, you may not want to use drive imaging for your regular daily or weekly backup routine. Image files tend to be large and to take a long time to make, and if there’s anything wrong with your system (e.g. virus infections), the problem will return along with the image when you restore it.

So you want to have an imaging program available for those times when you need it, but even with differential imaging, you may find it’s too time-consuming for backups and too tedious for restoring individual files. Plus they use proprietary archive formats, so you can’t open your backups without a copy of the program that created them.

That’s true of all imaging programs, not just Paragon Backup and Recovery. (More about drive imaging software on the blog.) Different types of backups work better in different situations. You balance the drawbacks against the advantages and decide what fits your needs.

Installation

When you start Paragon Backup & Recovery Free 10.1 for the first time, it prompts you to get a free serial number. Click the button and it takes you to a website where you fill in some basic information, and shortly thereafter you’ll get an e-mail with your product key and your serial number. Fill those in and you can get started.

One of the first things you’ll see is a visual representation of your disk, color-coded for the format (that blue means NTFS), and showing the number of partitions (this drive only has one).

You won’t have much time to admire it, though, because you’ll be prompted to create your recovery media. This is what you’ll need to be able to do a “bare-metal restore” from your backup, in the event that Windows isn’t working or you’re dealing with a replacement disk. Despite the illustration showing what looks like a ZIP disk, your options are CD/DVD and Flash Memory.

I started by creating a USB stick with the recovery software on it, but it turns out that neither Enna nor Mena is set to boot from a flash drive. I remember the contortions the Ur-Guru went through trying to get the netbook to boot from a memory stick, without success. This is a bit peculiar for a computer without an optical drive, if you ask me.

Enna is old enough that I’m not sure whether booting from USB is even an option, and I didn’t take time to go into the BIOS settings to find out. I just made a CD instead.

Backing Up (Creating Images)

If you click “Back up Disk or Partition” from the menu of options in the sidebar, the Paragon Backup Wizard starts you on your path to creating a drive image. You can choose any of your connected hard drives to back up.

I don’t know why you would choose not to back up the first hard disk track or the Master Boot Record, but you have the option to refuse—or, I presume, to back up that and only that. I selected my C drive (listed here as “Basic Hard Disk 0”), which is what I would normally make an image of. I haven’t yet come across a situation in which I needed an image of a non-system disk, though it’s possible that using one would be faster than copying the files through Windows Explorer.

There’s a little box at the bottom of this screen labeled “Change Backup Settings” that takes you to the advanced settings. I wish I’d noticed this before, because I would have un-checked the “enable image splitting” box. If you aren’t backing up to DVDs, there’s no reason to divide your backup file into DVD-sized chunks.

Next you choose the destination for your backup (local/network drive or CD/DVD) and whether to back up now or schedule the backup. Then you see an overview of your options, and then, on the final screen, a warning: “The wizard did not commit the changes. Backup & Recovery™ works in virtual mode now. To commit your changes use Apply command.”

This is geek-talk for the more familiar “Are you sure you want to…?” dialog boxes that you often see in Windows. If you click “Finish” to exit the wizard and then “Apply” from the top menu, your backup program will start.

It took a long time to make an image of my 80 GB hard drive. I’m not sure quite how long. I started at 6:44 PM, and it was still running when I went to bed at 9:00. I woke up briefly at 1:30 AM and noticed it was finished, but I don’t know how long before that it finished. The estimated time to completion had been 6 hours, which seemed excessive.

Once the archive is complete, you’ll see it in the Archives tab in Paragon Backup & Recovery.

Your primary options are to restore the archive, check its integrity, or make a differential backup—one that backs up the changes since you created that archive. Even though I haven’t accumulated that much new data on my machine since last night, I hesitate to commit the time it might take after the experience with the first image, so I haven’t tested the differential backup.

File Backup

You can do file-level backups with Paragon, via their File Transfer Wizard. The name of this component is a bit confusing, because it doesn’t say anything about backup. But if you want to copy files from one drive to another with Paragon, this is what you use.

You can copy files from any drive to any other drive by putting them on the file transfer clipboard and telling it where to send them. You use the same tool for backup and restore. It seems like a remarkable number of steps to go through for what amounts to drag-and-drop file copying, but it does work. You can see the transferred files in the navigation pane of the Archives window by browsing to the destination, and restore them by right-clicking and choosing “Export.”

Note that the File Transfer Wizard does not act as a browser to let you view individual files within your drive image. For that, you need the Restore Wizard.

Restoring Your Data

The Restore Wizard gives you the option of restoring your entire image or just selected files, and you can restore them to their original location or to a different location. I wasn’t about to test the full-image restore on a working system that I didn’t have another, known-to-be-trustworthy image of as a backup, so I tried a file-level restore and asked the Restore Wizard to export the !WordPress Asylum folder into the C:\Temp folder.

Once again, I had to click the “Apply” button before Paragon would carry out my commands. In the case of restoring a disk image and overwriting an entire drive, I can certainly see why you’d want an extra “Are you sure?” step. And, actually, if your backup is going to take 6 hours, you might want that warning then, as well.

The progress gears ground for a little while, and then Paragon informed me that the restore procedure was finished. But when I went to look in my Temp folder, I saw a very odd thing:

For some reason, Paragon restored substantial chunks of two folders that I didn’t ask for—but not everything from the folder I did want. Unless, of course, it never backed up everything from that folder. I have to say this was not a reassuring result. Is something wrong with my image, or with the Restore Wizard? Neither is especially good.

Conclusion

Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.1 is attractively designed but not aimed at the beginning user. One could argue that creating and restoring drive images is not a task for the technophobe, but there’s nothing inherently more complicated about using the product than there is about many consumer-oriented file backup programs. In part it’s just the language: “virtual mode” and “commit changes” are expressions for software developers, not ordinary users.

The range of image-creation options open to more advanced users is good. The option to use a USB stick instead of a CD for your recovery medium is a good one. Unlike some programs I’ve tested, backing up to network drives is no problem. Differential image backups can save time and storage space.

But the results of my file restoration worry me. At no time did Paragon tell me there was an error, which you would expect if something had gone wrong during either the creation of the image or the export of the files back onto the C drive. But something went wrong. So how can I entrust my entire system to this program?

Your mileage may vary. It’s possible that you could download Paragon Backup & Recovery 10.1 Free Edition, create an image, restore from the image, and have it all work flawlessly. The company would never have stayed in business if problems like this were the norm rather than the exception. So I’d say you should go ahead and try it if you’re looking for something like this—but test it in a safe environment. If it works for you, great. Come back and tell me about it.