Backup4all Professional 4.6

Although the market is saturated with different data backup/restore programs, it's not easy to find a program to suite your needs 100%. As shown in the title, Backup4All is a rich featured and highly versatile backup program.

When performing a backup for the first time, you find out that you can create several backup jobs, which can be grouped. You can choose one of the four predefined backup jobs. Since we're talking about predefined backup, the list can be increased with the use of plugins. What are these? Backup4all plugins for other applications can help you quickly backup program settings or profiles. For example, in order to back up Mozilla Firefox profiles you need to download and install the plugin and then create a new predefined backup job by selecting 'Mozilla Firefox Profiles'. You can get plugins for dozens of programs from the producer's website.

Some of you will find it a little bit weird that there isn't an obvious choice for a custom backup. You can create a custom backup by selecting 'None' in the 'Predefined Backup' drop-down menu. Next, you can choose to backup partitions, files, or folders. The backup files will have ZIP extensions so that they may be handled with any archiver supporting the ZIP format.

Backups can be saved locally, on optical drives or removable drives, on FTP servers, or on LAN locations. Full, incremental, differential, or mirror backup types are available. Those users worried about the safety of their data, will find out that the encryption level allows AES encryption using 256-bit keys.

Advanced settings include choosing the compression level and splitting of archives using predefined or custom volumes. Backup priority, file comparison criteria, and testing of backups are some of the features which I found quite useful while creating backups. You can also choose to run different programs before or/and after the backup process.

When put through the test, the program performed well regarding the speed of all types of backups, (but slower than Acronis True Image) in a busy working environment. Backup can be scheduled or set to complete before the system shuts down and the program can be set to send emails containing data regarding success, errors, warnings, as well as backup test errors or warnings.

Pluses: The nice thing is that you can even assign icons to your backups. The multi language support is another plus. The program has support for 15 languages. Program plugins can make your life a lot easier.

Advanced users may specify file filters for subdirectories in order to handle file exclusions. You can view statistics regarding your backups and summaries of each backup performed. In case you get lost among the settings, you can confidently use the 'Help' section, as it is very well documented.

Drawbacks / flaws: Unfortunately, you cannot backup/restore your active partition (the one which hosts your operating system).

In conclusion: An excellent data backup/recovery program, suitable for beginners and advanced users, home and corporate alike.

version reviewed: 4.1