Backup4all Standard
One of this month’s most technically advanced suites, Backup4all will appeal to power users
SCORE
PRICE $48 from backup4all.com
We’ve praised Backblaze above for its simplicity; Backup4all goes the other way, seemingly aiming to provide every file backup feature imaginable.
We can see the appeal of that, but it makes for an overwhelming first impression. The window opens with three tabs along the bottom, which switch between the Jobs, History and Scheduler views; each of these in turn has its own set of tabs along the top, exposing multiple ribbons full of buttons. It’s a lot to take in.
In practice, though, creating a basic backup task isn’t complicated at all. The wizard prompts you for a destination, then invites you to select your files and folders – note that Backup4all doesn’t handle disk or
partition images – and choose whether to create a full or differential backup. Then it’s on to encryption, scheduling and email settings. A nice touch is that, in addition to a name, you can give your backup set an icon to make it immediately recognisable in the job list.
One strength of Backup4all is that unlimited file versions are stored by default. When restoring files you can choose whether to grab the latest version of everything, recreate a particular moment in time or just go digging and see what you can find.
There are also some distinctive features that set Backup4all apart from the crowd. Uniquely, you can download plugins to back up data from over 100 popular applications, from Firefox to Minecraft. An unusual mirroring option is on hand too, which can be used to keep two systems in sync.
You get a good degree of control over your differential backups, including the ability to specify that a new full backup should be made whenever the differential images pass a certain size. And not only can backup jobs be triggered when a USB device is connected, but you can also apply disk rotation to keep multiple generations of backups on physically separate devices.
Of course, most people don’t need such sophistication. They’ll be happy with simpler solutions and it makes no sense for them to pay $48 (around £37) for Backup4all. Ironically, this backup solution isn’t for everyone. We also found that the initial full backup of our test folder took a rather leisurely 85 seconds. Perhaps that’s because, ecause, regardless of whether you’re using sing compression or not, the output of every backup job gets wrapped up in a ZIP file.
Still, we suspect techie types will readily excuse that in light of Backup4all’s many advanced features – and we’re sure they won’t blink link at the asking price for this exceptional xceptional piece of software.