14 DAY TRIAL // Although I am not 100% sure about my hard drive's reliability (you can't trust people, so why should I trust a machine?), I still have to perform a decent backup of my data. Anyway, until I get to finally do that, there's time to review some other interesting backup tools, and today it's time for NovaBACKUP Professional.
This program can be an excellent time saver, and, why not, a job saver, in some situations. Since the keyword is "backup", I won't keep you waiting too long, but first we have to find out about some general things and the program's interface. Let's go!
NovaBACKUP Professional reached version 7.5.1.40 and comes as a 30 days trial version. Its installation kit has 35.7MB in size and the setup process shouldn't be much of a problem. Now, let's find out more about how we can accomplish the backup mission!
This program has a simple yet good looking and useful interface, with the usual menu bar, a toolbar with excellent icons and a work area, but best approach for a beginner is to use the wizards. Once you start the program, you are located into the Welcome screen. If you want to finish the job earlier, then choose the tool you need from the toolbar and go into manual mode, but now I'll go through the wizards before drawing the conclusions.
The backup and restore wizards are very easy to follow, but you get all the advanced features you can have here. The backup operation has five steps - items selection, destination setup, options, overview and finish line.
The items to backup can be chosen manually or you can use a previously saved backup script. Destination and name are the next two things to setup, and you can use a local drive or a network location as destination. Of course that CD/DVD drives are also supported, and I was very pleased with the burning options available. Next, you can enable the software compression; verify data after backup or virus scanning. The Overview area allows you to see the settings you have done so far, without any chance of changing them here (of course that you can press the Back button and make the required adjustments, if any). When you have to finish, you can choose to start the backup job right away or schedule it. Ta-taa!
The restore operation has only four steps - source, items, destination and final step. Just follow them and you've got your work restored!
For emergency situations, you can create a Disaster Recovery boot disc, and this is the cherry on the NovaBACKUP cake's top. This operation is also assisted by a wizard, so you can't miss. This is the thing I've been looking for a while, and now it is found. Apart from this, a worthy feature is that you can receive backup logs through e-mail. All that you have seen so far and even a little more can be yours for 49.95$. It may not be the best price around, but you have a month at your disposal to decide if this is worth it or not. Now, it's conclusion time!
The Good
NovaBACKUP is an excellent backup solution - easy to use, reliable and with a lot of features. Even more, if you feel stuck, the excellent built- in documentation can help you escape clean from most nasty situations.
The Bad
Absolutely no problem for me, really. The previous version was priced 20$ higher, but now everything's almost perfect!
The Truth
NovaBACKUP is almost perfect - it can create emergency disks, encrypt your data and more. The wizards can help beginners a lot and experts won't lose their time using this application. If you are not happy with your current backup tool or still looking for one to start with, NovaBACKUP Professional can be the right choice. Don't be shy, try it!
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
