In the course of investigating Memeo for last week’s Backup Reminder, I discovered I had a problem. I’d been using Memeo to back up my F drive, Freya (a Seagate FreeAgent Go USB drive) to my L drive, Lachesis (a Buffalo LinkStation Mini). However, I was not letting Memeo run in the background, because I had previously had problems with that. Memeo sends out little warnings if you turn its background agent off, but I never paid much attention. What with needing to see whether my version of Memeo would back up from a network drive, however, I opened it up, checked it out, and thought maybe I should investigate the state of the backups.

I discovered that there were some recent files—and whole folders—that had not been backed up. This puzzled me, so I ran the backup verification to update things, but somehow it didn’t seem to work. I tried deleting that backup routine and re-creating it, yet still, the size of the backup didn’t match the size of the directories I was backing up.

Baffled, I decided to try setting up the backup job in Titan Backup instead. This time all the files got copied—except a few that were corrupt. But it took a long time. And it still takes a long time every morning, even though there aren’t that many new files on the F drive.

In the midst of all this, I got a message headlined “Important Information about Titan Backup.”

Dear Titan Backup user,

We would like to inform you of some important changes to Titan Backup.

GFI Software has been working with Titan for some time and has made significant investments in the technology, which it has now re-launched under GFI. GFI will continue making major investments in this technology.

We would like to inform you that GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition has now been launched. This version is being offered as full-featured FREEWARE for PC home users.

GFI Backup has retained all the functionality you are accustomed to in Titan Backup and also includes additional feature and improvements*. We invite you to try out GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition, which you can download from: http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm.

Please note that you cannot back up with the Titan Backup version and restore with the GFI version. Also, you cannot import your settings from Titan Backup to GFI Backup, as there have been major changes to the configuration file formats.

You therefore need to install GFI Backup and reconfigure, as follows: Download and use GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition, and run a new back up of your existing files, re-creating your backup and synchronization tasks as needed. We highly recommend this option.

“Well!” I thought to myself. “Something is definitely going on here.” So I downloaded GFI Backup 2009, but also decided to ask Flavius Saracut, my contact at Titan/Neobyte, what was up.

Flavius explained that GFI had been working with Titan for some time and made “significant investments in the technology,” and then pretty much recapitulated the information I’d already received from the sales team. I pressed him for more details. First, why make a previously paid product available for free?

At GFI Software, we believe that in hard economic times, vendors should work both with their channel partners and companies in general to assist them in sustaining their business until the economy bounces back. Apart from ensuring that we offer the best pricing possible to benefit small and medium-sized businesses, without scrimping on product quality and performance, we are also launching a number of initiatives to do something TANGIBLE to help.

As part of this, we have launched a We Care program and our first initiatives include:

• The release of the full-featured Freeware version of GFI LANguard. Using the Freeware version, companies can scan up to five IPs for free using the product’s full feature set — no restrictions whatsoever.
• The launch of a freeware backup tool for home users: GFI Backup – Home Edition.

That’s a laudable motive—even though I’d guess that neither product was a big money-maker in the first place. I’m always in favor of good, free tools.

My second question was about the differences between the two products. Despite the name change, the interfaces proved pretty much identical:

Titan Task Pane.

GFI Task Pane. (Advanced view would show same tree.)

Flavius kindly listed the following improved features in GFI Backup 2009 – Home Edition:

• No need to be logged on to the machine for the backups to take place
• Improved memory management
• Improved logging mechanism, status product messaging and task view
• On-demand check for product updates from GFI
• Support for Windows 7 RC build 7100
• Enhanced execution speed for tasks that include many files
• Single plug-in restore options
• Internationalization support for custom time and date formats.

So I set up the identical backup job and compared the two jobs. Interestingly, GFI objected to a few files on the F drive that Titan had not. And while it appeared to be slightly faster at completing the initial backup, the later incremental backups actually appeared to be slower than they were with Titan.

GFI Backup 2009 is easy to use and fairly versatile. It has a good feature set for a free product. But it doesn’t seem to be ideal for copying data from an external USB drive onto a NAS drive, for some reason. I’m not sure what the bottleneck is there, but its search for changed files seems slower than those performed by Karen’s Replicator and SyncBack and by Memeo. I much suspect that after the reinstall (which the Ur-Guru, who arrives for his annual visit today, has promised to help me with), I will go back to using Memeo to back up the F drive.

Nevertheless, GFI has some features I really like, and its speed is considerably better when copying from an internal to an external drive. For one thing, it handles both backup and sync. It also lets you do either incremental, differential, or “stacked” backups (the last take up both the most time and the most space, but save several complete versions of all your files). You can compress or encrypt your backups (either or both). And you can schedule the backup to run on Windows shutdown instead of Windows startup. This is a much more logical time to back up your machine, and also less likely to fill you with impatience while you wait for your backups to finish so you can actually start using your computer.

So if you’re looking for a good free file backup tool, check it out.

Titan Backup has partnered with LaCie (a manufacturer that has never seen fit to send me any drives to test) to create a contest. Just fill out the form on Titan’s website telling them what you would miss most if your hard drive (I presume they mean the one inside your computer) crashed tomorrow, then hand over the e-mail addresses of three unwitting friends or colleagues—or irritating people who pressed their cards on you at networking events; Titan won’t know.

The choices of what you’d miss most are “music and videos,” “emails,” “photos,” and “other,” which rather seems to presume that no business users are going to enter the contest. Though family photos are admittedly irreplaceable.

Given that I have the recursive problem of no storage for storage, I’m not going to enter this contest, but if you’ve got a stack of business cards lying around and no external hard drive to back up to, maybe you should.

Flavius Saracut over at Neobyte Solutions just made me a very generous offer: free copies of Titan Backup 1.5 (the not-quite-latest version) for readers of this blog/newsletter. If you want to upgrade to the latest version, 2.5, you can do so at a discount by using the coupon code NEOB-B916. The regular price for the software is $39.95.

I’m just taking a quick look at Titan myself. It has all the features you’d come to expect in a file backup program. You can back up files and folders by type or by location. (It seems quite willing to back up the files listed under “MozyHome Remote Backup” in Windows Explorer, but I’m not at all sure that would work. Perhaps I should try it, and find out.

Titan is not quite as simple and friendly to use as Spare Backup, but it does have a few handy extras. For instance, it will back up your Outlook rules. For reasons unknown to mere mortals, those don’t get saved in your .pst file, but in another Outlook file. You can export and import them manually, but that’s not something most people will remember to do regularly, so if there’s an unexpected failure rather than a planned upgrade to a new machine, you may have to re-create those rules.

In fact, you can back up a lot of different user settings, from your Windows Fonts and Scheduled Tasks to your IM programs. There are omissions from this list—presumably companies that Neobyte hasn’t worked out deals with yet. But all those Windows settings—those are the things that take ages to tweak back into place after a reinstall. (And my main laptop is way overdue for a reinstall.) As for backing up Registry keys—messing with the Registry is pretty dangerous. You certainly want to back it up before making any changes to it. Yet it would change if I reinstalled the machine, so I would not be likely to restore the Registry intact.

The ability to sync between different folders on the same computer (as well as different drives) is also intriguing. I can’t yet think what I’d use it for, but I like the idea. You can also use the sync function to create a DIY online backup to an FTP folder on your web host, for those who just don’t want anything hosted outside of their own control. You can compress and/or encrypt files, or just make straight copies. You also have the option to make differential, incremental, or “stacked” backups (what I’ve called “versioning” in other Backup Reminders).

Another bonus is the ability to run another program either before or after starting Titan Backup. The ability to run a backup program on shutdown does have considerable appeal to me. It makes more sense than doing it on startup, which is what I do now, because what if something happens between the time you shut down and the time you start up? It can also send you an e-mail message if your backup doesn’t complete properly, or just pop up an ordinary notification window.

The results of my test backup, which included Outlook settings, Windows settings, and Skype:

Start Time: 1/12/2009 1:38:11 PM
End Time: 1/12/2009 1:42:28 PM
Elapsed Time:  04:18  minute(s)

Files processed: 2005
Total Size:  574.96 MB

Transferred Files: 2005
Transferred Data: 574.97 MB
Transfer Speed:  2.23 MB/s

Status: Backup Task Finished Successfully!

It’s fascinating (to a geek like me, anyway) to find out where and how all these things actually get stored. Inside some of those folders are registry settings. Rather to my surprise, all my Microsoft templates (Word, PowerPoint, Publisher) got backed up under “Outlook Settings.” My Outlook signatures appear in three formats: text, RTF, and HTML. (I guess that makes sense—those are the three formats in which Outlook composes mail. But I only ever created them as text, since I’m the old-fashioned sort who prefers plain-text e-mail.)

Under “Scheduled Tasks,” I found my SyncBack jobs, but also the Apple Software Update. I hate that bloody thing. I want to remove it, not back it up. And, hmm…Rescue Reminder for 2HAA0GP3. I think that’s something for a backup program I don’t use any more. Yes, I really need to reinstall this machine. And as it’s possible to restore individual items from a backup job, even those registry settings, I can be selective about what I retrieve. (I’m pretty sure that doing a drag-and-drop restore with registry settings would be a Very Bad Idea.)

Titan Backup, like Backup4All, which I reviewed several years ago, comes from Romania. I have a soft spot for Romania, though I’ve never been there, because my best friend when I lived in England was from Romania. (She’s an engineer, but apparently so is everyone else who went to university in Romania during those years; if she’d been a Yank, she would have been an art history major.) I also like the interesting relics of Latin in the Romanian language, which is nevertheless quite different from other Romance languages. I never did learn to speak or read it, though.

There’s a distinct possibility I may consolidate some of my existing backup jobs and use Titan Backup instead, just because of those sophisticated little extras.

Download your free copy of Titan Backup 1.5.
Serial number to activate: 000020-ACM8KK-1YXTMT-JZT4FN-0915EB-JCMA7D-A6DDGQ-7NH5WC

Upgrade to Titan Backup 2.5 for $19.95 by using the coupon code NEOB-B916.

Yes, I was bad. I missed last week’s Backup Reminder. It’s those pesky clients again.

I did want to mention that last week I had the opportunity to visit United Layer’s data center in San Francisco, and was impressed. For most SOHO users, colocation (that means paying someone to store, power, and maintain your computer hardware in a secure location) is overkill. Even the Ur-Guru hasn’t seriously considered it, though when he heard about the megawattage going into the building, he was tempted to move his whole office there.

But if you use an online backup service, chances are they rent space in a data center like United Layer’s. If it’s possible, you might want to inspect the data center before committing yourself to an online backup service or a web host. Even in a building with uniformly controlled power supplies, temperature, and security, some setups are better than others. Do you really want to entrust your data to people who set up their server racks haphazardly, leaving the network cables hanging over the hot air vents to form a fire hazard? Maybe not.

So that’s the summary version of what I was going to write last week.

This week it occurred to me that my Faithful Readers might be able to help me deal with the backlog of backup software makers and service providers who want their products or services reviewed on this blog. If these hapless people have to wait for me to investigate all of them, it’s going to be a long time before anything gets reviewed. So I thought I’d list them and see whether anyone wanted to try one out and write a review of it. In some cases, you get a free copy of the product for indefinite use; in others just a trial version. If you see something you like, e-mail me at sallie[at]fileslinger[dot]com and I’ll get you set up.

Backup Software in Search of Reviewers

(In roughly the order that the companies or their PR people requested the reviews.)

1. SugarSync, “a web-based backup, storage and synchronization software/service from Sharpcast. SugarSync gives people an easy and simple way to keep their digital media and files automatically in sync across multiple computers, backed up online and remotely accessible from their mobile phones or through any web browser. A one-time download is all it takes to make sure your information is securely stored and always accessible.”
2. Multiply “gives users a comprehensive solution for sharing and discussing their personal media while providing peace of mind by automatically backing up valuable content in its original high resolution. While other social networking sites typically only save low-resolution copies of photos or grainy, flash-converted versions of videos, Multiply Premium users will have the confidence of knowing that their media is being backed up automatically, and archived in their original highest resolution.”
3. Memeo AutoBackup (PC) or Memeo LifeAgent (Mac). This software now ships with all of Buffalo’s consumer drives. I have used it, but don’t feel I should be the one to write about it, because I had a strange experience with it. (It was unnaturally slow, something perhaps caused by interference from one of my numerous other backup programs, and I think an honest description of my experience would be unfair to Memeo.)
4. FileEngine, “the only server that includes everything for less than $8/day.” This is actual hardware, a server in a bright red case that you rent for your company to use. “FileEngine includes standard installation, monitoring, maintenance, unlimited support, unlimited users, remote administration and an integrated backup & disaster recovery solution.” It actually sounds pretty cool. I’m not sure I need a server for my two-person, three-computer network, but if you have a small office and keep files on a central server—or you want to—you could be a good candidate for this product. For those who don’t know, buying your own server runs about $10,000, and of course any support would be extra, so it does seem like a reasonable deal. ($8 x 365 days is $2920, a veritable pittance.) I am actually quite curious about this one.
5. PutPlace, “a new way to think about backup. We back up all your content on all your PCs to a single place, with automatic duplicate elimination at our back end so you only pay for a single copy of all your unique data. So no more paying for 4 copies of the same set of iTunes on 4 PCs.”
6. Elephant Drive, “unlimited online backup and storage. It’s very big, it never forgets, and it works for peanuts.” They have a blog full of customer testimonials and other useful information. There’s a home version and a business version, and you can get 1 GB of storage for free.
7. Titan Backup. I have the installation program and reviewer key for this one. I was thinking of testing it on my mother’s computer, but didn’t have time. (How about it, Mom? Want to try Titan?) The marketing manager has offered an impressive discount to readers of this e-zine/blog. Titan’s clients include Johnson & Johnson, the DEA, and the Hong Kong Police. The program’s feature list is pretty impressive, and I might in fact want to try it myself to compare its performance on my overloaded machine with that of Memeo.
8. VisionWorks’ NullFTPClient and NullFTPServer. Both come in Free and Pro flavors. Strictly speaking, these are file transfer tools, not backup tools, but you can use them for manual backups over the Internet. Is there anybody out there not already wedded to a particular FTP client? Or maybe you want to set up an FTP server so you can exchange large files with a client. Step right up and claim your review copy.
9. Diskeeper 2008 Pro Premier and Undelete 2009 Professional Edition. Diskeeper is “most known for speeding up PCs with defrag software.” Seriously effective defrag software, not the basic version that comes with Windows. Undelete does what it says—recovers files that you’ve deleted. Actually, given the performance issues I’ve had lately with Enna, maybe I should handle Diskeeper myself. But I bet one of you out there who has hit the “Empty Trash” button too soon and lost something important would like to try out Undelete 2009!

Wow. There’s some really cool stuff there. (Well, it’s cool if you’re into backup, anyway.) For writing a clear, honest, and thorough review, you get the same payoff I would: a free copy of/license for the product, either permanently or temporarily, and in many cases, a chance to interview the CEO or another prominently placed person at the company if you want some background information. So…any takers?