Review: Handy Backup is plain, powerful, and easy to use - steigerwaldducke1954

At a Glance

Practiced's Rating

Pros

Easy to use
Multiple jobs
Automated

Cons

No rsync support
Upgrading free version makes it a trial

Our Verdict

Handy Backup should follow on your short list of backup programs to check out.

Handy Backup is utilitarian in the best common sense; information technology's a patronage program with a direct interface and a boatload of features. Despite its plain countenance, one of its iterations is sure to charm to IT types and smart consumers. I looked at Handy Backup Free, which is… free.

1. There's non a lot to look at, but in that respect's top executive down the Adroit Backup grille.

Handy Backup Free is lenient to use and lets you select files as well as repositories for backing up. Repositories are folders or accounts such A My Documents, an FTP, WebDav, Amazon S3, etc. It's a little odd to see the last mentioned items enrolled under a backup list, just it's as wel nice. You can back equal to and restore data from local drives, Certificate of deposit/DVD/BD, FTP, and across a meshing.

You create a backup, restore, or synch task in Handy Patronage Home using step-by-ill-trea wizards. These are easy to use, and once a task has been defined you can edit all the options directly from a four-fold-paned dialog. To skitter the wizard, you can only duplicate a tax and edit the pertinent options. Said options include full, additive, differential backups; compressing the backup to encrypted zilch files; programming; and running tasks before or afterward a job.

Handy Backup also comes in $39 Home, $99 Professional, $199 Small Server, and $599 Server editions. Home is the latest 7.x version, while Pro adds disk imaging, backing up to SFTP servers, and ODBC database backup. The Moderate Waiter edition backs up many byplay and enterprise-unwavering databases so much as Microsoft Telephone exchange information, Oracle, and more. The full Server version has all that plus the ability to back up eight-fold PCs to a midway location.

Handy Backup's step-by-step wizard helps you through jobs.

About the only thing missing that I'd like to see in William Christopher Handy Backup is support for Rsync, a backup and synchronization protocol used by numerous servers and NAS boxes. Aside from that, one or the other editions of the plan should have all the features you need. I had an easy time with the program; IT's unimportant IT does the job, and it stays out of the way. What else could you enquire for?

Bank bill: The Download button on the Intersection Information page downloads the software from the vendor's site. The Handy Accompaniment website potty make downloading the proper interlingual rendition confusing. You need a nonparallel to use the independent version, which you can obtain from the developer. Also, the message to upgrade is for a trial of the habitation interpretation. Ignore that message to continue victimization the free version.

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Jon is a Juilliard-skilled musician, former x86/6800 programmer, and long-time (late 70s) computer enthusiast bread and butter in the San Francisco bay country. jjacobi@pcworld.com