[geeks] windows backup software

[Shannon]

The last few days I have been evaluating a few Windows backup programs.

I am interested in your experiences in this area.

I have never really found Windows backup software that I like. They all
seem to have some serious flaw that annoys me or reduces their
reliability or performance.

Its 2013 and I find it amazing how many backup programs are stuck with
80s level interfaces, no support for multiple cores, poor use of
available memory, and poor backup retention and consolidation features.


My experiences so far:

Windows Backup:

Its free, and it works. But there are cons:

	- slow
	- horrible and nearly non-existant user interface
	- inflexible
	- no support for any kind of periodic retention of backups

You can certainly use it as a simple fire-and-forget backup, but that's
about it.

CrashPlan:

Its free (or can be), it works, does have a reasonable UI.

Pros

	- so far seems reliable
	- has a good realtime backup
	- understands concepts like keeping yearly, monthly, weekly
	  backups
	- can be expanded to do peer-to-peer backups, cloud backups
	  and network backups

Cons
	- it seems to be painfully slow at times
	- the UI has glitches, and is still fairly limited
	- remote backups slower still

Acronis True Image 2013:

Its $50, and it works, and seems reliable. However every version seems
to have issues that never get fixed, and now and then it makes you
wonder what the hell is going on. I've never lost data, but sometimes
end up with a lot more than I needed.

Pros

The UI is OK. Not a masterpiece, and some options are not done
intuitively, takes a bit to work out how to set things like the backup
retension and consolidation.

TIB files are documented and can be read if you are willing to write the
code. Can convert to Windows Backup if you ever want to stop using it
but still back up.

I have used this for years, and while it has done the job, its not very
well done IMHO.

Cons

It doesn't understand concepts like keeping weekly, monthly, yearly
backups... instead it makes you work out the math with its backup
management settings. Slight errors result in losing your milestone
backups (saved weekly, monthly, yearlies), or getting too many of them.
Its doable, but sofware should work that out for you or be easier to do
in the UI.

Consolidation is a nightmare, horribly slow and non-intuitive. Its bad
to the point where just making full backups uses less space and runs faster.

It sometimes has inexplicable general performance issues even on high
end hardware. This includes even the UI's operation, and the effect of
backups on a running system.

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I also looked at Backup4All and NovaBackup. NovaBackup seemed to have a
good reputation but I found its installation and operation messy. It may
be very good but I was turned off by how the client worked, but I might
not have given it a fair test. Backup4All I didn't get much time with,
and it had pretty much no retention features at all, so I have been
looking elsewhere.

Basically what I want:

- reasonably fast
- retention options like keeping weekly, monthly, yearly versions
  without me having to work out date math to make it happen
- good performance on any kind of backup consolidation if needed
  (prefer to not need it)
- fast indexing to find files to back up
- easy configuration and modification of backups
- a decent UI
- flexible destinations: local, attached storage, NAS... optionally
  something like Dropbox would be a bonus, but not required.