15-Minute Reviews :: Titan Backup v1.2.0.4

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is Titan Backup version 1.2.0.4 by NeoByte Solutions – A backup application with a large assortment of options and functionality.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Titan Backup is an easy-to-use and complete solution for home and small offices, designed for secure backups of your important data. It can make automatic backups of your important files and documents, emails and rules, registry, settings, virtually on any type of storage media including CD/DVD-RW, removable devices, network drives and remote FTP servers.

Using 256-bit AES strong encryption will ensure full security of your confidential data.”

Quick Pros

• Wizard-style interface eases you into setup of backup tasks
• Inclusion/exclusion masks handy for shrinking backups
• Ability to backup registry, various email clients and common applications’ settings a plus
• Network, CD/DVD and FTP backups handy
• Built-in scheduler is decent
• Syncing functionality as well within this application
• Backup fairly quick as well

Quick Cons

• Have to pre-build inclusion/exclusion masks
• FTP support does not offer secure transfer
• Incremental and differential backup only compatible with plain backup
• 4GB limit awkward – Especially with AES where splitting is not an option

Expansion

Backing up is such an important task these days; With so many potential data-damaging scenarios, it is critical for anyone who has a computer to perform some level of backing up their data.

When I started the application and started my first task, I was rather impressed with the layout of the wizard-style interface. All the options are spread logically across 6 tabs with both descriptive option names and a link to a help page built for each step, making the process simple for those who may not be as adept with backing up yet. The tabs aren’t stuffed so that it is awkward to wade through the options either; A common issue with some wizards.

There is a lot of functionality within this application. Inclusion and exclusion mask offer a way to make sure you’re only backing up what is needed and not a lot of junk temp files, compile-time files or otherwise. You can set the backup to only grab certain files, to ignore only certain files or a combination of both. The only problem here is that you have to build these masks beforehand on the ‘Options’ page before starting to create the task that will use it.

This application doesn’t just backup raw files either; You can use this application to back up portions of or your entire registry; This may be handy for those who are developing applications and worried about registry thrashing, or those concerned about losing registry-stored preferences or keys in a crash. There is also support for 6 popular email clients as well to aid you in the backup process; Granted, with Thunderbird all you need to do is backup up your profile folder; With Outlook and Outlook Express, the process is a lot more complicated, giving this application an edge for those running the Microsoft email clients. Finally, there is the functionality to backup your configuration of common applications; Ranging in categories of audio/video players, instant messengers, internet browser, utilities and Windows settings in general; There is a total of 20 applications currently supported and a lot of the Windows options, settings and more.

The back up destinations are interesting as well. While there is the common local file support (Including portable and CD/DVD drives), there is also support for network-based backups, including FTP support as well. With the FTP support though, there is no secure FTP functionality, meaning you need to either set up a SSH session to ensure the security of your backup.

Another little gem in this package is the ability to synchronize as opposed to backing up. I did not have the time to go into detailled testing with this functionality, but just going through it quickly it seems like a sound option for those who may have a laptop, website or otherwise and need an option to keep things in sync. What would have been handy here is if the application did offer scheduling options here of something to the effect of ‘On change’ so that there wasn’t any worry about remembering to sync when the device is connected.

During my testing, I performed a few different backups. I backed up my entire Windows folder on my test rig successfully; The speed wasn’t bad either with compression to max and verification of the backup turned on. It took a bit under 15 minutes work on 1.89GB of data; A respectable speed in my opinion for backing up. The performance of the functionality I tested (All but the email backup) ran quickly and smoothly.

I did have a few concerns with the application. While the use of the ‘stacking’ (Or revision) setting can be used with any of the compression or security options, the incremental and differential backup options only work with no compression and no password protection; In my opinion this is a weak point with this application; I would much prefer to keep my incremental backups to be compressed or even the files that have changed stored totally separately. This aspect of the application really needs to be improved to be considered a serious alternative to some of the heavy-weights out there.

Another concern I do have is the 4GB limit on any compressed or protected file. While I do understand that this is an issue with using the standard zip file format to maintain easy restoration from the backups, it is still an issue. I did not get to test it further, but I wonder if splitting would help with this issue; The issue here is that with AES, you can not split. This side of the application does need to be built upon further and a full system backup solution added.

Final Verdict

Overall this application does quite well. It performs backups in a respectable amount of time and getting set up is easy as well. As mentioned though, the support for larger than 4GB compressed and/or protected backups needs to be improved on, as well as support for compressed and/or protected backups that support incremental or differential backups. For free, if you don’t have a backup solution (or one that works well) I would recommend snagging this gem. As for paying $39.95, I would recommend evaluating it and asking yourself this ‘Is my data worth $39.95 to me?’ Granted, there are improvements that could be made to this application, but the price isn’t bad for what is offered compared to other solutions.

Update

This title appears to have a clone – East-Tec Backup. Please check this review for more information.

Posted by BladedThoth on Monday, July 30, 2007