Backup4all Professional Review and Giveaway

Backup4all Professional is a powerful backup software for Windows with a large number of features that will appeal to users who want more out of their backup programs. At the same time, the program is simple enough for the average user to reliably create backup of their data, thanks to the intuitive interface and the short streamlined backup creation process. Backup4all Professional has everything you would expect from backup software such as support for wide range of backup media, different backup modes (full, incremental, differential), file versioning, filters and scheduler.

Backup4all Professional employs a wizard-based approach that guides you through the entire process. The wizard gives you only the basic choices, like selecting the source folder and files, the backup destination (local, network, FTP, SFTP), the type of back and the frequency you want the backup job to run. A number of presets, in the form of plug-ins, let you backup specific programs and the data associated with them like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Firefox profile, Windows Live mail etc.

To access the finer controls of the backup job you have to go into the advanced mode. Here the choices are a bit more complex and varied. You get additional backup destination such as external drive, removable drive or optical media. When burning to optical disks, the program gives you the option to use a third party burning program.

In the advanced mode you can setup filters that let you always exclude or include certain types of files. The filters can be based on file names, file types, file attributes, file size and file creation/modification date. By default, certain files and locations are excluded from backup – the page file, hibernation file, temporary files and folders. One notable feature that’s worth mentioning is that filters can be applied to individual folders and different folders can have different set of filters applied, even if these folders are all part of the same backup job.

Backup4all Professional does four different types of backup: Full, Differential, Incremental and Mirror. Full Backup, as the name suggests, is the complete backup of the contents of the folders that are selected to be backed up. In Differential Backup, only files that have changed since the last full backup are backed up. Incremental Backup stores all files that have changed since the last full, differential or incremental backup. Mirror Backup is identical to a full backup with the exception that the files are not compressed in zip files and they cannot be protected with a password. A mirror backup is most frequently used to create an exact copy of the backup data. It has the benefit that the backup files can also be readily accessed using tools like Windows Explorer.

Other noteworthy features of Backup4all Professional are:

• Run specific programs before and after performing a backup. You can use this to run a cleanup program like CCleaner before backup starts.
• Track file versions and selectively restore any previous version of a file.
• Compress and/or encrypt your backups
• Detailed report after each backup job completes with options to see files added, deleted, changed etc.
• Built-in scheduler where you can define backup jobs to run at specific dates and time
• Automatically delete old backups or restrain backups to specific sizes
• Send custom emails after a backup finishes, with success, error and warning notifications.

Drawbacks:

• No disk imaging ability
• No real-time backups

Giveaway

Backup4all Professional retails at a steep $49.95, but here we have 10 copies of the software that we are going to giveaway to Instant Fundas’ readers. If you are interested leave your real name and email ID in the form below. Winners will be selected by a random draw. The contest closes on 31 July, 2012.