My hard drive is still alive and spinning, if I can put it that way. I don't want to advertise, so I will only tell you that I own an 80GB drive over an year old that came as a replacement for an identical one that died on me nine months after buying it, so that's why I am searching for a reliable backup tool.

Of course that I burn vital data to CD/DVD from time to time, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for, a backup tool to suit my needs (this requirement has already been accomplished more than once) and have that "certain something" required to make me start using it on a regular basis. I am playing with fire here, and when I'm going to get burnt again (of course that the best case scenario for this is that I won't have another hard drive failure in my entire life), I'll let you know, but until then, let's check another backup tool, shall we?

Backup Chunker is the name of the program that I have for you now, and its latest version is also the first public release, labeled 1.0. What I have here is a 30 days trial version that seems to have some features removed, but I wasn't able to find any details on this topic inside the built in documentation or the producer's website. Anyway, if you want to see what you're missing, you can pay 29$ for the full version, and your purchase is covered by a 30 days money back guarantee. The setup package is 2.87MB in size and installing it was a child's play, so no problems with this part. Now, let's get to the interesting parts: interface and features, as usual.

Backup Chunker's interface looks very good, although this program is so fresh on the market. This is the way things should be, but I have seen so many programs struggling to become user friendly after their first release, that I can only be glad when I see things happening as they should. Each time you open it, the program starts with the Project Wizard, the easiest way to create a new backup task, and I'll get to it only a bit later. The main window looks very good, and apart from the menu bar and toolbars, you get a tasks panel, a work area and an information panel. We have a lot of exploring to do, so let's start with a kind of magic...

The Project Wizard is as easy to use as it should be, containing useful information all along the road. There are four steps that you have to take care of here - Source Location, Target Location, Direction and Preview. If their names don't say enough, I will briefly describe the things you have to do inside them.

The source and target locations can be used for backup and synchronization, and while using the program, it is possible for these two to switch places (when performing backwards synchronization, this is the only occasion that I noticed). Anyway, after choosing the source location, you will notice that the target window looks a bit different, giving you the chance to choose between a local folder or removable device, a remote FTP, SecureFTP or WebDAV server.

Inside the Target Location window there's a small button that once checked, allows you to enable the most important feature of this program, the one that gives half of this application's name. I am talking about chunks, if you didn't get it yet. I don't know about you, but I can only think about tuna chunks, but we're not talking about food here. Backup Chunker can save thousand of files into small to medium sized compressed archives, recompressing only the affected files on each synchronization, instead of refreshing a single large archive.

Getting back to the third step of the wizard, this is where you get to choose the direction of the backup operation - forward or backward. After choosing what you want and pressing the Next button, you new project is done! In the Preview area, you are given information about what you should do after exiting the wizard - preview of the pending operations or launching them.

Once the wizard has finished, you can start adjusting the project's settings. Inside the left panel of the program, there are three things to check - tasks, preview and options. There's not much to say about these, but if you think about changing your source and/or target, checking the file tree, operation logs or change the folders selection, everything's just one step away.

This was a quick tour of an interesting and fresh backup solution, and now it's the time for the conclusions!

The Good

Backup Chunker is good looking, easy to use and has a slightly different approach to the backup operation compared to the programs that I have seen so far, but everything's in its place and ready to help you save the day, week or maybe year of hard work.

The Bad

There are two major problems that I have found here - the lack of CD/DVD burning support and the built in documentation's unpolished look (don't get me wrong, the Help file is well done, better than a lot of those I've seen so far, but more detailed information would be excellent, especially for beginners).

The Truth

Backup Chunker took me by surprise, and I must say that it was a pleasant one. Its backup tasks easy to setup, synchronization abilities or the 256bit AES encryption capability are only few of its strong points, and I advise you to discover all the other ones during your month of free use. Enjoy it and stay on the safe side!

Here are some snapshots of the application in action: