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A new low price, superior ease of use, and an excellent feature set make NovaStor's NovaBackup 7.3 our top pick among the applications we looked at for our recent backup software chart.
NovaBackup's interface is the perfect blend of old-school sophistication and wizard-based simplicity: You can use the program's hand-holding features to get familiar with backup concepts, and then, once you know what you're doing, you can employ the logical layout and workflow of the main interface to quickly create backups.
The $50 (as of 5/25/06) program supports backing up and restoring from hard drives, all common optical media, Iomega's Rev, and a vast number of tape drives. The upcoming version 7.5, a $30 upgrade due in July, will introduce support for Blu-ray Disc and for Quantum's GoVault removable hard-drive system. It will also add native file copy, a most welcome feature for people who like to use Windows Explorer to browse backups and restore files. If you can live with the backup app you currently own for a while longer, you might want to wait for 7.5 and save the upgrade fee.
In addition to the ability to create bootable optical media for disaster recovery, NovaBackup 7.3 now integrates virus scanning and backs up open files. With the more expensive Genie Backup Pro Edition and WinBackup 2.0 Standard, two other programs we looked at, the latter feature is available only in a pricey add-on.
NovaBackup earned good marks in our tests, backing up everything we threw at it. Our one caveat is that prospective users should first remove any preinstalled licensed versions of NovaBackup, such as Stompsoft's PC Backup 2006, to avoid conflicts.
Jon L. Jacobi
