NovaBackup PC
Plenty of features to offer, but the interface is neither pretty nor intuitive, and performance is mediocre
SCORE
PRICE £22 (£26 inc VAT) per year from novabackup.com
NovaBackup has been protecting files and disk images for more than 20 years, and now the main program has had a cloud component grafted onto it as well, turning it into a complete 3-2-1 backup solution. The downside is that there’s no longer an option to buy the software outright; home users are instead charged £26 a year for the client plus 2GB of cloud storage, an insultingly small allocation that can’t currently be expanded.
The software also suffers from a woefully outdated interface design. The layout takes cues from Office 2007, but with clunky visuals and a bitty layout that sprawls across ten different tabs. It’s not exactly hard
to find your way around, but it feels like a chore because the cues and buttons you want are rarely in the obvious place.
To its credit, NovaBackup has accrued a pretty unimpeachable feature set through the years. As you configure your backup jobs, you’ll find extensive backup filters and complex scheduling options that let you specify run times to the second and skip over predefined holidays. Retention rules are impressive, letting you cull your differential and incremental backups according to age, number and medium. And we rather admire the “Time Mode” restoration view, which lets you browse to a particular folder, then use a slider control to time-travel back and forth through successive backups.
The thing that’s conspicuously missing is hybrid backup: if you want to back up to two destinations, you’ll need to create two jobs. This isn’t an intuitive process as you can’t easily clone and tweak a job; rather you have to edit, rename and resave it.
Indeed, managing jobs in general is a pain because NovaBackup doesn’t maintain a list of configured tasks, but instead expects you to load and save definition files into the configuration and scheduler views.
Performance is nothing to shout about, either. NovaBackup took 47 seconds to create an uncompressed copy of our 2GB test folder, and a languid 9mins 29secs to send it to our NAS appliance. Even worse, we had to wait nearly an hour and a quarter for the files to transfer to the integrated cloud storage – a task that IDrive managed in under 30 minutes.
NovaBackup is a powerful suite, yet it’s hardly a pleasure to use – and the cloud storage is neither fast enough nor capacious enough to justify the price.