Rosie's Reviews

By Sandra Rosenzweig.
     
      Very early on in my computing career?and my computing career started very early on (I touched what I believed, and still do believe, was the second Apple computer ever made), I tried a newfangled backup program. Can?t remember its name. The backup process was as simple as things got in the days of CP/M and DOS. The recovery also worked when I tested it. So, cocky with my foresight and technical savvy, I added and added to that backup. And then, one day, one of my data disks (we?re talking eight-inch floppies here) crumpled up and died. (I crumpled, actually, and it died.) Where?s the backup? Right here. The trouble was, I no longer had that backup program, and I couldn?t open the file to restore it. I was forced to resurrect a few chapters of the book I was working on from scattered bits of paper and memory. (Details of this anecdote altered to save face.)
     
      I still back up, most of the time, but I just copy files and folders to another disk (now we?re talking DVDs and hard disks) so that if I need to restore them, there they are in the same formats they were created in?Microsoft Word documents in .doc, Microsoft Excel files in .xls, Adobe Acrobat files in .pdf. Not difficult, but one would like some automation. That?s why I?ve been using Microsoft?s SyncToy, which performs so-called native-format backups on demand or on a schedule.
     
      But NewTech InfoSystems? Shadow 3x goes a few steps farther than SyncToy does. First, you can set it up to back up your files every time you hit Save; second, like SyncToy, it retains your files? native formats. You may also schedule backups every evening, every two hours, or at whatever interval you like. During one trial, I dedicated a drive to the backup, and every two minutes it copied everything I did to the data files I specified. However, when I was using a file, Shadow was locked out, and every few seconds it sent me a couple of whining popup error messages: Shadow couldn?t back up the Microsoft Outlook files (usually .pst files) so long as Outlook was open. No prob. I just created another backup job and set it up to back up Outlook every night after I closed Outlook.
     
      Other settings include the invaluable ?Save all previous file versions??unless you want to save only the five most recent. Or none at all. I prefer having a trail of every change in every file. You can configure each backup job with its own distinctive parameters. And, if you like, you can set up your backup to delete any file in your backup file when it is deleted on the source disk drive. NewTech InfoSystems? Shadow 3x, $29.99. www.ntius.com.

---