Introduction:

"WinBackup makes it easier than ever before to secure your data by making regular backups. Not only will WinBackup help you organize your backups and schedule automatic backups, it will also protect your data using the latest encryption techniques, compress data to save space, create detailed logs of all backup operations and more. WinBackup also features one of the most intuitive user interfaces you have ever seen, making even the most advanced features easily accessible to beginners and professionals alike."

So proclaims the blurb on the company website about WinBackup. Impressive stuff there. Can it stand up to the hype? Well, wouldn't you know it, we're about to find out! Sounds like fun? Well no possibly not, but I do enjoy dispelling wonderous claims made about products. Lets see if WinBackup really does all they say it does.

Testing - Backup:

As with so many software products these days, WinBackup can be run entirely using a wizard. I'm no elitist. I don't refuse to use wizards because they're too "easy". I love things to be easy. So to walk you through the program, lets fire up the backup wizard and see where it takes us.
This might be a bit lengthy and screenshot heavy, but it shows you just how simple the program makes things. You really are taken through everything step by step, as shown below.
Some of the screenshots are actually composites of 2 wizard steps, just to reduce the number of images.

Getting going


Choosing the files to backup


Setting the simple options


Choosing where to store the backup, and letting it do its thing

That's how simple it is. 8 steps, and the program will have your data backed up for you.
To try out the wizard, I decided to backup a few reviews I have sitting on my hard drive. It was all very simple... check the folders I want to backup, choose a location for the ".wbb" backup file, and hit go. Off it went, and voila.. G:\reviews.wbb was created.

The backup file weighed in at 11.7MB. The original files were 12.1MB, so not a huge amount of compression there. The folders were almost entirely html and jpeg files, which will likely have affected the amount of compression the program could manage.

Testing - Restore:

Obviously this doesn't prove anything, we need to see if the program can restore as well. Restoring is just a case of switching from "Backup" to "Restore" mode. The restore interface is very similar to the backup interface, helping the program remain intuitive. Just 7 steps this time!

Getting started with the restore, choosing what to retrieve from the backup file


Selecting the simple options


And off we go! You can choose to restore to the original location or somewhere new

As simple as the backup process, as you can see. The results:

Happily enough, all the files are present and correct in the "restoretest" folder. In fact, WinBackup duplicated the full directory structure - very handy for copying things back where they belong.

Additional Features:

The test backup procedure I conducted would have been easily enough conducted simply by copying the folder. But for backing up several different folders at once, WinBackup can make things much easier. Additionally, backups can be scheduled to run at regular intervals. What's more, you can elect to backup to a CD-R.

The scheduling could come in very handy I feel. Especially with a multisession CD left in a drive. If you had something important you wanted to ensure would not be lost to hard drive failure, simply have it backed up to CD every night. The program also supports CD-RWs, and so can overwrite the data with each backup. How handy!

We saw earlier with my backup test that the compression really made no difference at all. With large amounts of files, the compression comes into it's own. Here's a great example of the compression I managed to get on a load of Windows themes.

Much better, a 51% reduction in size. The compression possible depends entirely on the type of files being backed up - some file types are much more lossy than others. Things like zips and DivX encoded avi files are already heavily compressed, and WinBackup will struggle to compress them further.

Another feature I almost forgot to mention is that you can choose to password product your backup files. I'm no international hacker so I have no idea how good those encryption options are, but for a little added security I'm sure it will stop the nosey office lurker snooping around your files.

Conclusion:

All in all, WinBackup is an impressive product. I was never really in the market for a backup system, but this programs wonderful simplicity has won me over. For backing up vital files automatically, this program is a god send. I forgot to mention the manual which is included. I didn't refer to it at all since the wizard is comprehensive enough, but it's nice to know it's there. The downloadable version I was sent costs $39.95 at time of writing. A boxed CD, complete with printed manual, costs $59.95 (both of these prices include the $10 off offered at time of writing - "Order WinBackup this week (July 1-7) and get a $10 discount").
For 40 bucks, about £25(ish), the downloadable version is well worth the money. I personally wouldn't bother spending the extra $20 for a boxed version when I can write a CD and print a manual myself at negligable cost.

I can't fault it at all. It does everything I would have expected it to do, and does so with minimal fuss and bother. For anyone needing a backup solution, I can do nothing but recommend LIUtilities' WinBackup software. Top marks.

Pros:
Cheap.
Simple.
I dunno.. superb! (Gosh!)

Cons:
Nothing I can think of... it's not free?

The addendum below is a lengthy read and very image heavy. To cut a long story short I ran into problems when delving a little deeper into the program. It looks at the CD burning feature (eventually) if that interests you. All the problems were solved by updating to the latest version which, if you were to buy now, you would get anyway. So the above pros and (non-existant) cons stand true.

Addendum:

Backing up Windows:

Whilst talking to Dash about my first draft of this review he suggested I try to backup the Windows directory ("folder" to you new-generation of windows users). Apparently the files inside the directory that remain open (the swapfile? I really don't know what files are concerned) cause difficulties to backup programs. Indeed, if you try to copy the Windows directory to another location you will get an error message (or at least you should).
Hoping WinBackup would stand up to this challenge, I set about making a backup procedure for the Windows directory. I thought I'd take the oppurtunity to test the write to CD feature as well since I hadn't tried it yet and realised I really should have done so.

Setting up the backup procedure as before


Configuring the CD burner for writing


The CD was only 640MB so I had to lose a few files. The PCTV Rave directory dropped us down enough.
Notice the great compression ratio here


All going well so far - preparing to write the image file


D'oh!

So what happened? The program halted whilst trying to copy the "WMSysPrx.prx" file to the cd image (temporary file). Why?
Unfortunately, some google-powered researched yields little information. It is presumably some system file or other, and clearly doesn't like being backed up. This is very odd, since I can freely move it in and out of the Windows directory.
Thinking it might be something to do with the CD writing I was trying to do, I attempted to instead back up the Windows directory to my G drive (the only one with space free!). This unfortunately yielded the same error message.
The error message is confusing... "Parent dir does not exist". Does it mean C:\Windows, the parent directory for the file in question? Thinking it might mean the parent directory for my backup file, I tried creating a directory called backup and saving there instead. I didn't expect a result.. I didn't get one.

I can't get it to work. I've tried *lots* of times. Worse still, the error crashes WinBackup. Hopefully the team behind the program can offer a reason for, and solution to, this problem. Until then it becomes quite a major "con". Not being able to backup the Windows directory is quite a let down, since it's a folder (gah, keep slipping into saying folder instead of directory..) that people are quite likely to want a backup of.

We'll come back to this later!

The CD writing saga (an epic tale):

So onto testing the CD writing. Bad news! It didn't work.

Too right the media isn't ready, that's my DVD drive you fool!


Sounds like good advice, I'll do that

For some reason it insisted on trying to write using my DVD drive (not gonna work pal!). After throwing much abuse at the PC, I eventually found myself at the WinBackup support pages on the website. It seems I have been using an outdated version all along! Gosh. Armed with the 1.81 update I set about trying again. Lo! It worked. The blurb for the patch mentions recognition of 400 new CD (and DVD, swish) writers. I guess mine's one of them. On a side note, the new support for DVD writers opens up the possibility of writing HUGE backups.

The new version has a different interface for choosing drive.. and actually recognises mine! Bonus!


A new options interface also, introducing DVD writing and file splitting into the fold

Another problem! The CD appeared to be empty. Things weren't going well. Thinking my CDRW might be a bit crap, I got Nero to erase it and tried again. It still didn't work, so I got out a sacrificial CDR to try with. Still empty. No good, WinBackup.

WinBackup thinks it's done the job. Explorer begs to differ

If this seems a bit diary-style, that's because I am writing it as I try things. I was so happy about WinBackup, but now that I've delved a little deeper (which I should have done in the first place.. bad me!) it seems to have a number of flaws. This is a real shame, since otherwise it's a very well put together program.
Hopefully the problems I am experiencing are an isolated incident. But in the light of these problems, I have to introduce some doubt into my recommendations of WinBackup. Perhaps it needs to mature a little more so that the bugs can be ironed out. I don't understand at all why the CD writing does not work - the free space on the CDs seems to change yet the files are not evident.

Another twist in the tale! My goodness. I removed the aspi file WinBackup had previously recommended I download from the Nero site, and tried to write again to the same CDR. The file has mystically appeared on the CD now! It seems that update was not the best idea and obviously has adverse effects.

Success!

Backing up Windows Revisited: (perhaps "Reloaded" would be more topical)

With new found confidence, I decided to see whether my newly patched (although now running in "Unregistered" mode since I didn't get a valid key with my review sample) version of WinBackup to take on the Windows folder once more. I'm beginning to think WinBackup might be lying about the estimated size.. it seems to come out as a convenient 640MB quite often, but occasionally jumps to 700 odd.. very strange. Eventually I managed to convince it that it would actually be 1.2GB compressed. Perhaps this is why things weren't working. Taking out the "system32" directory (a vital one, we'll see if it makes a difference) brought it down to 110MB compressed. Go go WinBackup!

Success!

The CD's done! Unbelievable. The file troubling us before was in the Windows root directory, and hence is inside this backup file. Looking inside the file prooves this.

There's the little blighter!

So it works! Unless there's stuff inside the system32 directory which it can't backup. Let's try!

So far so good...


Haha! There's no stopping it now!

The patch to version 1.81 seems to have addressed all the problems I came accross. Whilst writing this addendum I constantly wondered what I was going to have to write at the end, how I was going to change the mood from "this program rocks!" to "this is a buggy pile of crap". Luckily now I don't have to.

Conclusion: (take 2)

The final verdict? Well, what else can I say.. this program rocks!

mrplow

Related:
LIUtilities homepage.
WinBackup product page.