Customer Reviews

Genie Backup Manager Professional V8.0

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Many programs do backup, others do System Recovery. But the ones that do both with comforting reliability, speed, and simplicity are very few. Out of the 3 I tried; Genie Backup Manager Pro 8 stands out with shiny stars.
Save and Restore made my CD drive disappear. I had to uninstall and use Window Restore to get it back.
True Image Home 2009 trial did the job, but it was a bit slower than GBM, and I could not test the system restore functionality in trial. GBM is more user friendly, but I guess this is a personal preference. With GBM Pro trial you can try the whole thing for a month. This gave me assurance and reflects the company's confidence in their product. If you decide to try GBM Pro, make sure to download the right file for your computer; 32-bit or 64-bit.
I tested GBM Pro on 2 laptops; XP Pro 32-bit, and Vista Premium 64-bit. I created Disaster Recovery on USB HD in 3:42 hrs (250 GB/90 GB used), including Integrity Test. It did the same job on 6 DVDs in 4:18 hrs. I created initial full backup and scheduled incremental backup. It ran successfully on schedule even with Sleep mode. It defaults to backing up typical documents, music, and pictures, and also critical system files, and any additions or exclusions you want. All jobs are completed within Windows while I was working.
I had some inquiries and wanted to test the company's support. I used ticket system on the company's site and I got courteous knowledgably responses in less than 12 hours. With that kind of service and with such a reliable product, I did not wait for the trial period to end and placed my order on the company's site. I receive my license in less than 1 minuet, and all I did to register my trial version is to paste it on the registration window.
Genie Backup Manager Pro 8 is definitely worth trying, You virtually have the full functionality for 30 days to get to the confidence and comfort level you need to commit to buying a utility that is a must have for every computer.

I purchased Genie Backup Manager Professional V8.0 in CD form. It came with the holder smashed and the disc cracked. Several e-mails later a new disc was sent out. This one was received intact. I loaded the program and was never able to get the program to run without fatal errors. Their customer serve could only come up with lame suggestions on how to fix the problem. I then requested my money back. That got their attention. Some 20 hours of testing and many e-mails back and forth found the problem. The files were too big for the file system. The problem is that customer service claims the program flags this fault. It did not on at least 20 different backups. Genie is the most versatile backup program I could find but not without it bugs. When you do not get satisfaction from customer service ask for you money back. It is the only way to get their attention.

I used the "try before you buy" option and that worked out satisfactorily - enough so, that when I learned I would have to install a new hard drive - I opted the "buy" and paid the price - since that time, the product will not run and continually crashes. While I was a prospective customer, I got immediate help. Now that I am a customer, I get mediocre to no help. I must wait 24 hours each and every time to respond why their product doesn't work - all I get is pointed to a knowledge base without answering my questions. The product won't work, and I can't get help in time since my drive's going out - at this point, I think I want my money back.

After searching the Web for a RELIABLE backup program for my computers, I thought I'd found the answer in Genie Soft.

I'm a recording engineer and have very large amounts of data representing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of paid work from clients. Needless to say, a RELIABLE backup is of paramount importance.

After running a backup using 37 DVDs, I decided to verify file integrity prior to deleting files off my system to free up space...boy, I'm glad I did!

To my horror, the "Genie" magically omitted 25% of my files from the backup - they FAILED to backup! When I contacted customer support (in all fairness, they were responsive), here's a portion of the e-mail (word-for-word) that I received:

-It is not recommended to backup system file (registry folder, program files, and windows folders) using regular backup schemes.

-Please note that it is not recommended to backup this much data to CD/DVDs.

WOW. I thought this was a backup program and the purpose of it was to backup files...all files and not just ones they deem necessary. Too much data? I swear I didn't see any limitations on data amounts in their glowing product literature. I guess the "Genie" can only grant 75% of your wishes.

If you're still tempted to rub the lantern, be warned, you may not like what comes out.

I have used this product since version 6, and it's always been troublesome. It will work fine for a while, maybe months, and then will stop for no obvious reason. I guess I'm gullible, because I keep upgrading. But as another review stated, this product is extremely flaky and help is nonexistent. Lately the product has decided to "skip" files I'm trying to back up. First a few, then a couple hundred, now every single one. And there's been absolutely no change in the system since the last successful backup about a month ago. Needless to say, there has been absolutely no response to my help ticket.
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Windows 7 update. As of February 2011, GBM8pro hasn't been updated in several years and it shows. All of my criticism from the above still applies. I have yet to get it to run properly on a brand-new Win7-64 laptop. And even though my backup set, partitions, and files are identical to the last laptop, GBM will not resume backing up from where I left off. I would have to create a whole new backup set and back up my entire new laptop.

The saddest thing is that as of 2/11 I've also tired NovaBACKUP, DT Utilities PC Backup, Acronis True Image, NTI Backup Now, Handy Backup, and Comodo backup. GBM8pro is the only one that at least purports to do exactly what I want--an incremental backup (and some folks have a VERY odd definition of "incremental") to an NAS server, no encryption, no compression, no images, no predetermined schedule, sometimes with start-end date filters. The shortcuts for specific jobs is also handy when getting non-technical users set up.

It's depressing that at this late date there are no backup software packages that are capable of a reasonable degree of customization. It's also a pretty severe indictment of the state of software project management.

PC Mag [...] had rated this very highly which is how I learned of it. The full article is available at [...]. It is a very good, inexpensive, dependable backup software application. It has good flexibility and is user friendly (for a backup program). It allows you to back up an entire hard drive or just selected folders and files. You can do full or incremental backups and you can schedule them or initiate them manually. I have mine scheduled for a full backup once a week and a daily incremental backup, all to a removable USB hard drive. You can tell it to break the back up into 2 GByte slices so you can keep the backup hard drive nicely decluttered by running Windows defrag program from time to time. We have a Windows XP operating system and it works very well with that. The program also allows you to create a disaster recovery CD and a corresponding disaster recovery backup on a hard drive. You can set levels for compression and encryption and set password protection or not. The more the compression and encryption, the longer the backup takes but the smaller and more secure it is (the default values are fine for me). You can also adjust the intensity of the backup effort so it will run more slowly in the background so it won't interfere with you while you are using the computer or more quickly if you schedule the backups to be done at night (as I do). The manufacturer was very responsive when I had some initial questions about it. Unlike Norton Ghost, which we also have, it will not communicate on-line when you tell it not to.

To add to my initial review one year later (January 2010): in a year of ownership I have greatly benefited by learning to depend on the program's termination features. You can have it just run the backup on schedule and stop, or after the backup you can also set it to automatically perform "power" functions. These include shutdown, log off, Standby, and Hibernate (assuming you have configured your computer for Hibernate). What this means is that my copy of this program at work starts a backup a little after my normal office hours and shuts the computer down afterwards. So I get an incremental backup of the day's complete work without spending productive office time doing it and save energy by turning it off, too. At home I have it tuck itself into Standby after our normal bed time. So we get full use of the computer all day, a backup of the day's activities afterwards, and don't let it run up our utility bill, either. And Standby turns off the USB backup drive as well to preserve its longevity. On the other end of the spectrum you can set it to wake up your computer from Standby to run a backup before you need to use the computer. The settings also show up in the Scheduled Tasks for Windows XP and Windows Vista (unlike any of the Ghost products). We now have four licensed copies of Genie. It is easily a better backup tool than the others we have tried: Norton Ghost 10.0, Norton Ghost 14.0, Norton 360, DT Utilities' PC Backup Pro, or the native Windows XP and Windows Vista backup programs. Genie does what you tell it to, unlike Norton Ghost which has a fit because it missed one day's scheduled incremental backup or Windows Vista's native backup which will only restore the computer to the way it was when the backup was made and therefore requires the same size hard drives partitioned into volumes exactly the same way (sort of a joke because by the time a good hard drive wears out you find they do not make them that small anymore so you can not replace it with an identical hard drive!).

I bought five (paid-for) copies of this program for my home network, and upgraded to version 8.0 when it was released. Everything worked as-advertised, even after changing from Windows Vista to Windows 7 until, one by one, Genie Backup Manager started crashing on each machine over a period of months. It refused to run past the file inventory process. As an engineer, I could probably spend my time trying to find the cause, but that's really not my job. My first guesses are, based on the symptoms: (a) Genie Backup Manager (GBM) is mis-applying or mis-programming Java and these faults were revealed when Java updates were loaded and/or (b) GBM is trying to create files that are too large in size for the file system to support. Regardless of the problem, GBM isn't paying me to beta test their failed software, and so I have dumped them and am evaluating alternatives.

This review is for Genie Backup Manager Professional V8.0, I have used it for a year or so. I provide IT support for individuals and small businesses.

The product does eventually do what it is supposed to do, but getting there is the hard part.

The user interface is cluttered and very, very slow in any operation that requires access to the file system, such as creating a profile of what files are to be backed up, or accessing them for a restore operation.

Little attention seems to have been paid to the ergonomics design of the program; e.g., Options that pertain to individual backups have settings that can only be found in the global settings dialog, which you cannot access while in the modal backup dialogs.

The error log is useless, no details are included beyond failed, or skipped (paths of skipped files are included, but not the reason for the error.)

If you like to tinker this program is for you. If you simply want to get your files backed up be prepared to wait, scratch your head and enjoy the charm of 1987 style software in 2009.

I downloaded this to "try it before buy it". They give you 30 days to evaluate, albeit they bug you every few hours.

It failed. While it successfully created a system backup, then a full backup and then an incremental backup, I decided to verify the data. First time it verified the data, so I decided to just run it again. It should verify again, right?

Nope, it crashed and came up with a dialog box to send the error information to Genie. However this is supposed to be a stable product after many generations, and it can't run a verification twice in a row. From comments by others, it seems that the larger your backup, the more likely this is to fail to meet expectations.

As programmer/analyst who writes Windows software for a living, I can tell you without hesitation what I would be looking for if I were Genie-Soft. It almost certainly has a memory leak, or a poor use of memory causing an out of memory condition. (You may have been fooled into believing that memory issues have gone away completely with modern version of Java and .NET, but take it from an expert, they still live on, just more subtely).

I have abandoned considering this for purchase (from Amazon) because of this. And this is sad, because overall, it is the best designed product from a GUI perspective, I'm told. I'll have to try others to see if I agree.

I did a lot of research in backup software before purchasing this software. (My background is an engineer testing and writing software for a living.)

I spent almost a week trying to get this software to backup about 20 to 40GB of data spanning multiple DVD's. The only technical help was via email and the cycle time to get a question(s) answered was about once per day. Furthermore, the technical help had a lot to be desired. Several times, I got incomplete or incorrect information back and then had to wait another day to get a further explanation.

I never was successful in getting past the first DVD. It failed. I went through the entire knowledgebase and did everything they suggested and finally gave up trying to back up with this product. It got great reviews wherever I looked, though, so this has me stymied.

After returning the product, I went and got DT Utilities "PC Backup Pro 10". Even though its interface wasn't as nice to use as Genie's was, it worked the FIRST time and backed everything up to multiple DVD's.

(BTW- Based on feedback, I was told by technical help that DVD's are becoming more and more unreliable as a backup media. After this entire exercise, I went out and bought a large external drive and am now backing up to that media instead of DVD's. Maybe Genie would have worked with that "media" but I never persued that course of action.)