FileKeeper Pro

FileKeeper Professional lets you define what types of data to watch, how often to back it up (continually, every hour, etc.), how many versions to keep, where to store the backed up data, and how long to keep it. It's undeniably powerful and performed flawlessly in my testing, but I found its approach to selecting the data to guard both cumbersome and limited. I keep all my data in a single location and would appreciate the ability to just tell the program to back up everything in a particular folder. However, FileKeeper only lets you define a "policy" covering types of files, e.g., *.QBW. You can exclude folders, so if you're keeping a local backup by other means, files in that location will be not be backed up. Unfortunately, there are no universal exclusion rules--they must be redefined for each policy. Also, I couldn't find a way to exclude an entire volume (aka partition, e.g., D:\) which could make excluding data even more tedious for those with lots of drive letters.

On the other hand, I loved FileKeeper Professional's ability to back up to multiple locations, including a version repository on the local drive. Most CDP programs limit you to one or two--a local and a network or auxiliary location.

FileKeeper Professional is a very competent program that will work just fine for most users. However, Yosemite Technology must improve the data selection methodology before I'll give up my current favorite, IBM's Tivoli Continuous Data Protection.

--Jon L. Jacobi