15-Minute Reviews :: DoubleSafety v4.1.0.106 (Quick)
Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is DoubleSafety version 4.1.0.106 by PowerLabs – An application to ease the process of backing up your critical files.
Software Description
As Giveaway of the Day states:
“DoubleSafety is a program for automatic data backup. With an effortless user interface, you can store backups on your hard drive or use a local area network, send them to an FTP server or write to a CD or a DVD. You can also automatically encrypt data using the 256-bit AES algorithm.”
Quick Pros
- Easy-to-use wizard for setting up backup tasks
- Built-in burning functionality as well as LAN and FTP backup
- Compression, encryption and incremental backups (And all work together)
- File splitting to work with media and OS limitations
- Capability to make a shortcut to desktop to trigger backup functionality
- Memory usage shrinks to under 2MB while in task tray
Quick Cons
- No secure FTP support
- No differential backup functionality
- Windows would not allow me to see files inside of Zip or decompress
- Concerned that the software is being distributed under so many names
Expansion
If you’ve already looked at the screenshots for this title ( Can see them at the DoubleSafety site ) and you are a regular to Giveaway of the Day or my site, you may have noticed a similarity to a previous title or two. It appears that this is another case of the application being sold under yet another company name and website, but being the same product. Below are the reviews of the other two titles I did.
I’m not going to go into a great deal of detail on this review, because the review of Backup Expert is functionally identical to DoubleSafety, even down to the issue I had decompressing the zip archives. For those of you who didn’t read the last review, essentially it comes down to the zip file is not well-formed. Open up the zip file in your Explorer window (The built-in zip functionality in Windows XP and so forth), and the zip file displays itself as being empty. When you try right-clicking and hitting ‘Extract All…’, Windows gives me a ‘Windows Security Warning: Windows has blocked access to these files to help protect your computer.’ It took me using a third-party application (I used jZip to open it), and from what I understand it is due to the drive path (and not just the directory path) that throws Windows for a loop. Why we need a full path is beyond me. If you want to get a better feel for this application, check out the review of Backup Expert.
To mention that there was more effort to make the application at least look a little different. However, again, it is just a matter of the icons, about box and the graphic on the wizard page that varies, and nothing else which I can locate.
I will touch on the angle of the multiple sources of distribution. While I can’t confirm whether it is all the same company selling as different products, friends sharing code for income, or merely a process of code reselling. What does concern me (as with last time) is this is a system critical program and it makes me feel uneasy going into an application that appears to be resold, and a central point of update (As noted by the version numbers). If we send our bug report to the distributer of the title, how long would it take to have the issue fixed? What happens if my title doesn’t upgrade to a newer (fixed) version and we end up with a corrupt file? It makes me feel a bit leery indeed. Sure, code reselling might be fine in other titles which may not be playing with process-critical aspects, but for something we expect to work perfect the first time, it weakens my feelings on the titles. How many other versions of this same program are out there?
Final Verdict
I am a bit leery to recommend this title. Seeing that there is another title using the same code/codebase as two other titles, and that you’ll need a third-party application just to open the zipfile (since the Explorer built-in support for zip dislikes these zipfiles), I would recommend being cautious if you do get this application for free. Besides the zipfile issue, it does seem to be a good title. If you do get the title, you may want to remember to pack jZip or another zip-handling application alongside your backups. As for paying for this title, the issue of the zip file really needs to be rectified, and possibly the issue of the multiple-programs be at least addressed.
Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, October 29, 2007
