Review: Roxio Backup MyPC 6.0 Deluxe
Roxio/Sonic's veritable Backup MyPC has been revamped once again - Iain Laskey investigates
| Product | Backup MyPC 6.0 Deluxe |
|---|---|
| Company | Roxio |
| Web | www.roxio.co.uk |
| Price | £34.99 |
| We like | Supports a wide range of devices and media types |
| We don't like | Limited scheduling, not much new in this release |
| Rating | 7/10 |
| Requirements |
Backup MyPC used to be sold under the Sonic brand name but after Sonic bought Roxio, a number of their programs have changed hands. Now under the Roxio monicker, Backup MyPC 6.0 is the latest version of the now long established backup and recovery program.
The Program can be used standalone but also integrates nicely with the current version of RecordNow! Deluxe which you can read about here. One of Backup MyPC's strengths is the wide range of hardware it supports. As well as tape, CD and DVD, it also works with ZIP and JAZ drives and other removable type media. IDE, SCSI and USB are all supported although there are some caveats. You cannot for instance use USB based floppies to do a disaster recovery from as there are no DOS USB drivers.
Backup MyPC starts with 4 simple Wizards. You can choose from Backup, Restore, Automatic Data Protection or Disaster Recovery Preparation.
Backup starts by asking if you want to backup the whole PC or just certain files/folders. If you choose the latter you get to choose which ones before proceeding. You then have to choose between a full backup or an incremental one where only new and changed files are backed up. The normal way of working would be to perhaps do a full backup on Monday then an incremental each day for the rest of the week which would speed up the process each day. You then choose the device from any of the supported ones that are present on your system.
The Restore Wizard lets you choose a device before asking if you want to retrieve the catalog (list of files) from your PC (quick) or from the media (slow). You can then choose the files and proceed to restore.
Next up comes Automatic Data Protection which is just a rudimentary scheduler offering the ability to do a full backup of all files on a designated day of the week and optionally to do an incremental one on the other days. We weren't very impressed with this and felt this option seriously lacked flexibility. The only saving grace it had was that you could specify the user account and password this task would run under to ensure it completed successfully even if someone else was using the PC.
Finally, there is Disaster Recovery Preparation. This analyses the PC before recommending exactly what you need to do a full recovery from scratch in the case of total loss of the hard drive or a similar catastrophic failure. We tried it on a test laptop which it duly analysed before advising we needed a Windows XP Pro CD, 4 floppy disks and a blank DVD-R. All well and good but the laptop had no floppy disk drive so that was that. Unless it's a Windows limitation we are not aware of, this seems somewhat silly that it insists on a floppy disk drive when so many newer systems don't have one. An external USB floppy disk isn't an option either for the reason cited above.
For those keen on a more manual approach, you can perform backups and restores by selecting exactly the options you wish, bypassing the Wizards. This proved a better option we felt as it opened up a wide range of additional options missing from the Wizards.
Backups could now be full, incremental or differential and you can select whether to verify or not (we say always verify unless your in a hurry). A choice of compression modes, password protection and whether or not to mark files as being backed up can also be chosen. The system state can be backed up and advanced options such as enabling CD/DVD failed backup recovery can be enabled. The latter allowing a restore to continue where it left off, not having to begin again.
Restore options are less numerous but usefully include an option for restoring NTFS file permissions and the ability to specify a tape retension operation before attempting the restore.
There is also a Tools menu which varies depending on the hardware attached - a tape drive might have initialise, retension and format options for instance.
Problems
There were certainly some issues we were less than happy about. The readme file lists a few nasty ones such as issues with certain ATI drivers and the inability to work with FAT32 drives over 32Gb when using Disaster Recovery. It is also impossible to restore from backups created using previous versions which is sloppy. Finally, we had a minor system hang when moving through the backup options screens but it seemed to recover OK eventually.
Conclusions
Roxio Backup MyPC is a mixed bag. On the downside, we felt the Wizards were far too limiting and most users should use the manual mode of operation which provides much more functionality. Some of the limitations such as reliance on floppy disks for Disaster Recovery and inability to restore older backups are also rather poor. There also seems little of note new here.
On the plus side, it supports the full range of backup hardware, has plenty of options if you dig around in manual modes and can perform limited unattended backups. It's also light on system resources using a shade over 20Mb of disk space - much better than many of its peers. Be aware though that the catalogues which hold information on backups can get quite large. We'd also like to commend the online help which has lots of useful information and tips as well as a full description of what everything does.
On balance, we recommend Roxio Backup MyPC but note the limitations, if you can live with those, it provides a robust backup solution for the home user and can help recover both individual files as well as the entire system if needed.
