Handy Backup - Backups Made Easy

Review: Handy Backup Version: 4.0 Build Sept 2nd 2004 Reviewer: Womble Provided By: Novosoft Inc Review Date: October 2004

Conclusion:

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All of the tests that I carried out were successfully completed by Handy Backup. The program is very easy to use but is extremely powerful in what it can do. This can sometimes be a hard combination to get right. As previously stated, the only problem I had was with the FTP backup but after doing further tests with other programs, I feel I can safely say this was because of my connection and FTP backup server.

Looking back to the original statement made by Handy Backup,

Handy Backup 4.0 is an easy-to-use program designed for an automatic backup of your data to any type of storage media including CD-RW devices and remote FTP servers. Handy Backup is intended for personal and corporate users in a networking environment or on a single machine.

I can honestly say that it achieves this easily.

The only real faults I can find with this program are the Email alert page and lack of DVD support. To set the Email alerts up, you will either need some computer knowledge with an understanding of SMTP servers, or the ability to find out the information to get this to work. The lack of DVD support is also a fault in my opinion. Although for home users, the need to backup a DVD’s worth of data is probably overkill, for businesses this is a possibility. At minimum though having the ability to write to a DVD would allow you to put more backups onto one disk.

To complete this review I submitted a couple of questions to the developers of Handy Backup regarding some of the operations of the program and future developments of the program. Below are the questions I asked along with their responses.

At present there is no DVD support with the product. Is this a feature that will be added in the future? If so do you have any dates when it will be added?
We're currently working on DVD support but this task is complex enough and I'm not ready to claim dates yet.

Are there any additional features that you are planning to add in the upcoming versions?
Possibly we will concentrate our efforts on local area network and server support.

Is it possible to simplify the Email notification page for less experienced users of the program?
Unfortunately it's impossible to send an email without knowledge of your SMTP server settings.

As you can see DVD support for this product is being worked on and should hopefully be ready in the near future. Unfortunately it seems that you will have to know your SMTP settings in order to get the email option to work. That aside it’s great to know that the product is being improved with new features being added along with improvement of the existing features.


Lastly we come to the Final Word...

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Summary:

1. Introduction 2. Installation 3. Program Run Through 4. Test Machine And Data

5. Testing The Program 6. Positives And Negatives 7. Conclusions 8. Final Word