Sarasota PC Monitor
NTI Backup Now 4 Deluxe Suite
A Software Review
byBrian Lewis
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.This is the latest version of backup software from NewTech Infosystems. It contains two backup programs, a file backup and a drive image backup. They both have a simple 1-2-3 interface that allows anyone to readily make backups of their hard drive. The interface is similar to that used in their CD/DVD burning software. I have used earlier versions of NTI's backup software and find version 4 to be much improved and much easier to use.
The packaged version of the software contains a slim user's guide of just over ninety pages. I must admit that I was able to use the software without making any reference to the manual. Let's start first with the DriveBackup software. This software allows you to make an image file backup of your hard drive or create an emergency rescue disk set. The emergency rescue set uses either CD or DVD disks to store the image file. The first disk in the set is bootable so you can restore your entire hard drive should you have a drive failure. There is also a separate program called the Disk Image Backup Explorer. Running this program allows you to select and restore individual files or folders from your image backup. It is also quite easy to use.
I installed the Backup Now suite to my laptop computer. It has a 60 gigabyte (GB) hard drive with about 21 megabytes (MB) of programs and data in over 70,000 files. Starting the DriveBackup software opened the main window which had vertical buttons labeled 1,2 & 3. There were also three icons on the menu line labeled "Create Emergency Recovery CD/DVD", "Create Drive Image Backup" and "Restore from Drive Image Backup". First I clicked on the Create Emergency Recovery CD/DVD icon. The first button selected the drive to be backed up, my C Drive. If you have several partitions you can select the one to be imaged. Clicking button number 2 brought up where to back up. In this case the box had my DVD burner identified. (If you are not creating a recovery disk, you can select as the destination any drive with an assigned letter including network drives.) The third step was to select the speed and writing method. In most cases, the default settings will work quite well.
After this it was just a case of putting a DVD disk in the drive and clicking on the "Start" button. The next window shows the progress of the backup process and the anticipated number of disks that will be needed. In my case, it said it would take four disks. Actually it took five. In the process each disk had one 4 GB file and one file of less than 500 MB. Apparently this is because Windows versions before Win2K and WinXP have a 4 GB file size limitation.
The actual writing of the backup files was quite slow. The limitation on backup speed was the speed of my DVD writer. It is an early one that writes at 1X or 1350 kilobytes (KB) per second. It took over 1.5 hours to write the first disk and then it took another 1.5 hours to verify the 4 GB file before writing the smaller file. All in all, it took over 13 hours to write and verify the 5 disks in the Emergency Recovery set. However, this is not something you would be doing every day or even every week. I would also hope that if you do this you have a newer, faster DVD burner that runs at an 8X speed (10,800 KB/s). That should reduce the time to a more reasonable 2 - 3 hours depending on the time needed for the program overhead.
After writing the DVD's I took the first disk and tested it to see if my computer would boot from it. It booted successfully and loaded the DriveBackup software. The opening menu indicated the location and size of the image file. There was an option to restore the hard drive or to make a new image file. As with the DVD writing, the loading process for the software was very slow. My presumption is that the speed of my drive was a significant factor in this process.
So next let's look at the file backup software. The philosophy that NTI uses in their promotion of this software is that the file/folder backup is what you would routinely use and the drive image would be used only when major program or hardware changes were made. The Backup Now software also has a scheduler function which is not present in the Drive Backup package.
The interface in the Backup Now software matches that of the DriveBackup software. The major difference is the ability to select the files and/or folders that you want to back up. The file selection window has a tree structure identical to that found in Windows Explorer. This should be familiar to most Windows computer users. In my case I selected the "My Documents" folder to be backed up. Then I selected my external USB 2.0 drive as the destination for the backup file. You can also change the name of the backup file at this time. Then it was click on Start and the backup began. It took 1.5 hours to backup and verify the 7.6 GB in the folder. It is worth noting that Acronis TruImage software took less than two hours to make an image copy of the 21 GB drive to the same external drive.
Part of the problem with the slow speed of this software may be due to selecting file compression. In truth, the actual compression of the files was minimal and could have been eliminated. That might have increased the backup speed, according to the User Guide. The "My Documents" folder was reduced in size from 7.6 GB to 7.25 GB. Not much of a saving. The DriveBackup report indicated that the size of the files was increased from 21 GB to 37GB. That was an obvious error. When I totaled the file sizes on the DVD's it was 20.6 GB. Again, not much of a savings. My recommendation would be to forget the file compression when using either of these backup applications. If you are backing up to a second, fast, internal hard drive, then I suspect your backup times would be much shorter than I experienced.
If you are looking for a backup package that can do either image file or individual file/folder backup with ease, then the NTI Backup Now software should definitely be considered. It has a very easy to use interface for both backup and restore functions. It is hard to go astray when using this software. Other backup programs that I have used with similar functions are much more difficult to use, especially with the restore function. The primary shortcoming of this application is the length of time required for the backup process. I should also point out that if you are using Win2K or WinXP, you must have administrator privileges to install and to run this software.
NTI Backup Now Deluxe Suite is produced by NewTech Info Systems. It has a retail price of $79.99 for a boxed version with a CD. The download price is $69.99. Prices on the Internet from Froogle.com search range from $14.50 for the CD only to $49.95 for the full retail set.
NewTech Info Systems, 5 Mason Ave., Suite 150, Irvine, California 92618. Phone: (949) 421-0720. E-mail www.ntius.com.
NTI Backup Now Deluxe Suite is offered on this month's Special Drawing (See Page 10). :
Copyright 2005. This article is from the November 2005 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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