Customer Reviews

Backup Now! Deluxe

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

This program just saved my wife in a HUGE way. I've been using computers for quite a while, and never had a problem with lost files. This past January my wife started her masters degree, and we decided to install Backup Now. Sure enough, last Thursday my hard drive got fried. I ended up having to buy a new hard drive, but all of our data was saved on CD-ROM.

The program includes a scheduler to backup your system on a regular basis to CD-ROM. It is smart enough to only backup files that were created or changed since the last backup.

I'm running this on XP with no problems. The criticism about it not creating an XP emergency disk below is true, but the XP install disk serves that purpose. 99.9% of the value of this program is in backing up key data on a regular basis, not creating a emergency boot disk.

This kind of program is really only necessary for people who have critical data on their PC that changes regularly. If you just keep your resume and some old tax files on there, just back them up yourself whenever you think of it. If you have critical data that changes regularly, buy this program. In addition, a good anti-virus program like Norton and a program called GoBack are highly recommended.

Six months ago I purchased Back Up Now for my ME system and have been so happy with it. The product did exactly what it said it would. I recommended it to my friend who has Windows XP and he loves the product.
Some of these other reviews sounds like they are from computer challenged people. To blame a software company for their CDRW drive having old firmware is lame. Updated firmware means that drive manufacturer encountered a problem on that drive that new firmware can fix, but it doesn't mean that the software is not compatible. Additionally, most people know that XP cannot create a bootable CD with CD-ROM drivers. They can only create bootable CD just to boot up with plain DOS. This is an OS limitation. If you can create a bootable CD with CD-ROM drivers on XP alone
then I will agree with you that the software is not compatible with XP. I have other Back Up utilities that have this same requirement due to XP's limitations. My friend uses a Boot floppy from Windows 98 to make his disaster recovery CD. If you don't have any friends with Windows 98 or ME (Hmmm, that would be rare) then you can always just create a Windows Image
backup and then use the XP boot floppy and add their own DOS drivers for their CD-ROM drive and run the restore program from DOS. I think borrowing a boot disk from a friend is much easier.

I bought this product because it claims to be able to "make an exact duplicate of your system and restore it to its prior state." After spending lots of time making a sytem image of my Windows 2000 machine with a 12 GB drive to 17 CDs, I needed to restore the machine to the same hardware, except for a new hard disk (hard disks fail, right?). It took SEVEN hours to read all the discs, and left me with a system that blue-screens (crashes) on boot saying, "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE". After sending three messages to support and waiting three days to get a response, NTI support tells me that the product is incapable of restoring an image of a Windows 2000 system to a working state. And they won't even refund the purchase price.

Look for a product that actually does what is advertised and is backed by a company with conscience. NTI fails on both counts.

Last Month I purchased the "Back Up Now Delux Product". To date I haven't been able to create a bootable recovery CD. It was advertised as being compatible with Windows XP. I successfully created an image backup of my C & D drives, however when I tried to make a recovery diskette and bootable CD your program asked for a Windows 98 system disk. Not having Windows 98 I tried with using a my Windows XP system disk. This did not work as your "Back Up Now" program would not identify the Windows XP system disk. I called the technical support number and was informed by "Alex" that it would only recognize a windows 98 system disk and I needed to obtain one for it to work. I explained to "Alex" this product was supposed to be XP compatible. He of course could not give me an explanation for this. Although somewhat upset I went looking for a windows 98 system diskette to use as per Alex's advise. I located the 98 system disk from a friend and it seemed it would work however I received still another error. Again I called the tech support number and found out from "Alex" that my CD RW drive needed a firmware update although it is listed on your website as a CD RW that IS supported by "Backup Now".

The "Backup Now" program because of the problems outlined above has proven it is not yet compatible with Windows XP nor is it compatible with my CD-RW drive without a firmware update. It is requested that if this opinion is incorrect that someone explain how I am supposed to back up and restore my desktop PC without firmware updates or using a Windows 98 system diskette when I have a Windows XP operating system. What good is the image backup if I can't use it to restore the hard drives without a recovery boot disk? This was advertised a XP compatible, there is no warning or other documentation indicating that you needed a system 98 boot diskette nor that any firmware were needed for "Backup Now" to work properly or successfully.

Mel

Backup Now! is absolutely horrible! Many features did not work as the manual suggested. I have submitted numerous issues to their technical support, and have never had any sort of follow-up or resolution on any of them. Using it with their scheduler is even worse because many errors like failed backups go completely unreported while silly conditions like no files selected for incremental backups are always reported by a dialog that must be dismissed by the user. This is not very convenient for unattended backups -- which is what a scheduler should be for. I also ran into cases where the target drive (where to store the backup files) was offline, so Backup Now! silently changed the backup location on me. Unthinkable!

Please note all the other bad reviews of this product. I wish they had been here before I went to buy this piece of junk -- I could have saved myself some money and a lot of headaches.

I suggest you DO NOT PURCHASE THIS PRODUCT. It does not work on Windows 2000. I worked with Customer Service for about a month, purchased new CDs, got driver updates and other stuff.
In the end they were giving me instructions that did not even match up to their product. I gave up and just backup up my machine with ROXIO one disk at a time using Easy CD Creator 5.
I wish I had listened to the crummy reviews other people were giving Backup NOW! They should call it Broken NOW!

I used CD-RWs in my first attempts at using this program. I wanted to speed up the backup operation, so I switched to high-speed CD-Rs. The backup took over 40 minutes per CD, with verification and compression turned off, on 24X CDs in a 32X writer on a 1GHZ AMD system. The first pass at this, the system hung on the 9th CD. The second pass, the program reported problems with the last CD, the 10th. Did the same operation with Norton Ghost and had everything backed up in less than an hour! I have not tried restoring files from this program, so I don't know how reliable it is.

I bought this product for my windows XP system. I wasted 38 CDs trying to make a recovery CD set. It would consistantly hang up on the 5th disk. Once it actualy locked up my computer. Product support is nonexistent. After the first 2 replies to my emails for help with no results, they just quit even replying. And they will not give refunds.

This product seems to work fine on Windows XP as far as performing a backup goes. But, if you have a drive failure, or want to restore a selected file - forget it. It does not work when you try to restore.

Very buggy and very slow. Tested on both of my office systems. Does not backup to more than 1 volume in your DVD writer (lots of contact with NTI support, but no resolution "it was my drive" they said - so why is it specifically listed on their site as compatible?

Most troublesome - did a backup to an extra HD on my system - that took all night to backup 20Gb!) and when I did a restore it froze after "restoring" for 12 hours. I am self employed and am my own IT person, so while not an expert I am a fairly advanced user (been doing this since 1984 and I have never had so much trouble and frustration). I cannot afford to loose my data, I would go out of business. So I cannot recommend this product and would advise that if you are really stuck, use the backup function in XP (it is fast - 1hr to do 20Gb and it restores perfectly - but only does backup to a HD, not a DVD writer).