Backup Made Easy:
A Six Point Guide to Buying Backup Software, PART 1
by Kevin J. Vella
Uniblue Systems
Many people and businesses lose their data because the product they’ve
bought doesn’t live up to its initial promise. With hundreds of backup
software vendors on the market, people usually perform searches on such
generic keywords as “backup software” to find themselves with millions of
documents to sift through before making an “informed” decision. With so
many pages people would typically look at the first ten or twenty entries
and either buy the first thing that comes near their budget, or give up or
end up buying software that is too expensive for their needs.
Before buying backup software, you must first look at your real needs and
make a list of product attributes and related features that will satisfy
these needs. Second, look at the software vendors who are reviewed by
computer magazines and compare their products across your needs list.
Third, look at whether the vendors have been in the business for several
years and whether they have a reputation for great customer support and
product innovation.
The most difficult of these stages is building the attribute and features
list. The Six Point Guide to Buying Backup Software should give you
thorough knowledge of what attributes and features you should look for in
any backup software. Due to constraints of space, I have split this guide
in two parts. In Part One I will briefly describe each of the attributes
while in Part Two, explain each attribute and detail all the related
features.
1. “Ease of Use”: Ask, how easy is it to install the backup software? How
easy is it to set up the first backup? How easy is it to use the backup
software regularly and to create backup schedules? How easy is it to
restore data?
2. “Value for Money”: this is rather subjective and does depend on your
budget. However, don’t just look at the price of the product. Think of how
long does it would take to use the product. How long does it take to make
backups and restores? As a home user, this may not be that important but
as a business user, you wouldn’t want to spend half an hour just to run
your daily backups.
3. “Reliability”: Many backup companies focus only on the backup side of
things rather on the restore. Just think, what is most important in backup
is the ability to restore data without losing anything. Therefore, ask,
can I install the product, set up a schedule and then rest assured that my
data is being backed up with 100% accuracy?? What levels and types of data
validation does the product have to guarantee restores?
4. “Performance”: Of course, you must have a product that is fast and that
does not sacrifice reliability, value for money and ease of use for sheer
raw power. Who would want to have a 100% accurate restore product that
takes one hour to backup a few hundred megs of data!
5. “Depth of Feature Set”: What features does the product have? How does
the product compare to other vendors? Many times you would have to draw up
these comparison sheets unless the vendor has done it for you.
6. “Breadth of Backup and Media Coverage”: Finally, make sure that the
product backs up your PC (or notebook) and supports a strong list of
backup storage media including CD, Pen Drives, Zip Drives, etc..
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