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Novastor NOVABACKUP PROFESSIONAL EDITION FOR TAPE DISK & CD/DVD

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Novastor NOVABACKUP PROFESSIONAL EDITION FOR TAPE DISK & CD/DVD Review

by Jon L. Jacobi

Program balances ease of use, price, features, and media support; the next update looks promising, too.

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.

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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

User Reviews for Novastor NOVABACKUP PROFESSIONAL EDITION FOR TAPE DISK & CD/DVD

Reviewed by: fishfart

Duration of ownership: 6 Months

Strengths: good backup, easy to follow directions

Weaknesses: SUPPORT is very poor. I spent 3 days trying to get the program installedd. The support personal gave me over a dozen "try this" none workdde. It was like they didn't know how to fix the problem and where just pulling the fix out of thin air. I spend 3 days emailing and calling before I gave up on the program. Now I am looking for a good reliabel backup program.

Overall Evaluation: Good backup and restore directions in the manual. Support? don't even bother. The "technicians" are lazy, uninformed, and don't know how to fix any problem in the program goes South, and it will. Save your money and buy some other backup utilitity. PC Word's review is based upon a working program. Why didn't try the get suppor. Then, the review would have been "poor"
Reviewed by: BOUTYM

Duration of ownership: 2 Years

Strengths: Relatively simple to use

Weaknesses: Serious restore issues

Overall Evaluation: Have used NovaBACKUP with my customers since the 6.x versions and was always happy with it until 7.x versions arrived. Have found that restores are VERY unreliable with 7.x versions. To date, NovaSTOR has been unable to resolve issues.

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