Customer Reviews

BACKUP MYPC 5 DELUXE BY STOMP

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

On my XP Dell laptop this product would not start. I got an error message which was conveyed to Stomp by e-mail for their advice. They responded promptly. I followed their instructions to the letter... copy all the .dll files into the main folder, and leaving the original .dll files in their original location. This did not work...same error message. (This problem must be common because it is addressed extensively in FAQ). I also uninstalled and reinstalled, etc. to no avail. I followed up with another e-mail. Their response was then that the problem was being worked on. After a couple of weeks I checked and found my request closed without my knowledge. I made a second identical request, to no avail. They just closed their file without any acknowledgement to me. Nothing... no explanation or apology... nothing. Now I have a piece of software which is useless to me. I know it works great on 98se machines, but question XP. Would appreciate help if someone knows the answer.

There are wizards that guide you through backing up an entire drive, just important files, or making a "disaster recovery" backup in case your hard disk crashes and you can't boot.

Once you've defined a "backup set" that includes which files to back up and whether you want to back up all files or just changed files ("full" backup versus "incremental" or "differential" backups), you can select a set from a drop down menu and hit one button to back up. Just two steps to a frequently-run canned backup.

For example: I have two sets, one called "Photoshop Full" and another called "Photoshop Incremental." I run "Photoshop Full" once a month or so to back up all my digital photography hobby work. That takes about an hour to run. Every night, I run "Photoshop Incremental" to back up just the files I've worked on that day, which takes about 2 minutes. I just select which set I want from the drop down, load the media, and press a button. That's it!

It supports CD-R, DVD+RW, and DVD+R. These are the formats I've tried; it supports many more optical formats, plus tape drives and external hard disks.

Compression is supported, as is hardware compression if your device supports it. Many SCSI tape drives do.

Backups can be scheduled to run at pre-determined times. You can have a backup run at 2am, for example. Do make sure you load media with sufficient space before you go to bed.

Restore is also painless: you can quickly restore the latest version of any backed up file, or you can choose which version of the file you want to back up. So, if you mess up a document beyond recovery, for example, you can restore yesterday's or last month's version.

On the negative side, the backup MUST be restored with this program. It doesn't write regular files that you can just copy off the backup media back to your hard disk. And, backups can only span up to 32 pieces of media, regardless of the media capacity. That's about 150GB for DVD+RW, or 23GB for CD-R. If you have more data than that, you cannot do "whole disk" backups; you must choose smaller file sub-sets to back up.

Disaster Recovery REQUIRES a floppy disk drive. I don't have one. It won't create a bootable recovery CD, as far as I can tell.

The GUI could be a little more dressy too, but I'm nitpicking here.

No more excuses for not backing up! Set up your most frequent backups as backup sets, then enjoy two-click or scheduled, unattended backups.

In short, speaking as a reasonably advanced user, I found Stomp to be big and clunky and not nearly as easy to use as it should be. And the price? Yikes! When I finaly let go of the fact that I had blown a bunch of bucks on it I dumped it and went to a great little freeware app called SyncBack.

The software will not recognize my backup device. My Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop (XP Home) is hooked to a Seagate External 160gb hard drive via a USB cable. Yes, everything is working, plugged in and rebooted. BackUpMyPC still only sees the computer's CD and Stomp's web site tech support recommends installing the set-up drivers that came with the external drive which I have done. So, I'm disappointed and can not recommend.

I was never able to fully restore. The only thing that really worked was to re-install XP and then do the recovery from there.

The results then work ok as long as I never use any of the driver options, including the "recommended".

All in all, better than Ghost, but not by very much.

I have worked with Backup MyPC for nearly two months. Support has been fairly responsive, though problems still persist. This is the first time I've written a review of any software, but I hope it will help others avoid the expense and frustration that I've had.

One one new Dell machine with a DVD drive, Automated System Recovery went very well. Then after an early drive failure, I found that system restore did not work quite so well. I was never able to boot the drive after several attempts at recovery. That sort of defeated the purpose.

On another new Dell machine with a CD drive, I could never span disks with CD-Rs. I ruined about 25 in the process of trying. Memorex CDs showed erros with every attempt. CD-RWs *would* span! There was no mention of this in help files or by tech support. But the program will not complete the system recovery for some reason with CD-RWs either. After a few hours of mostly attended backup due to CD size, I get lockups on disk 3 or 4 or 5. But who knows if the restore would even work if backup did?

I doubt that most reviewers will attempt a recovery just to test software. I would love to speak to anyone who has successfully done so. At this point, I seriously doubt that it can be done.

The software does fine on individual data (groups of files) backups and restores. If that is all you want, go for it or get any free zipping utility. If you want protection for a drive crash, I hope you have better results than I've had.

David - shopping for backup software again...