NewTech InfoSystems Backup Now v.3.0 Deluxe

If the rating system allowed it,...

Strengths: It's the best product I've found for reliably (so far) doing regular backups with verifications on a system with many partitions

Weakness: Terrible user support, poor documentation

If the rating system allowed it, I'd give the product five stars and support zero stars. The NTI Backup Now Deluxe Suite should be purchased ***only*** by expert users. It's a fine product. I'm a computer professional. I've been using backup software on my personal computers for seventeen years. I switched from my former backup software only after a long search for the right backup software to...
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If the rating system allowed it, I'd give the product five stars and support zero stars.

The NTI Backup Now Deluxe Suite should be purchased ***only*** by expert users. It's a fine product. I'm a computer professional. I've been using backup software on my personal computers for seventeen years. I switched from my former backup software only after a long search for the right backup software to replace it. NTI works better than any other I've tried.

But the documentation is inadequate, error messages can be obtuse, and user support is apparently non-existent. I e-mailed a question to NTI five days ago. I have not received a response yet. This is sadly consistent with other reports I've read about this company.

It's really a shame. This could be an extremely fine product that I'd recommend highly to anyone if NTI would just provide support and better documentation.

Examples:
Before buying it, I used the trial download from NTI. The backup portion worked perfectly, but the drive image portion generated DVD errors every time I ran it. I e-mailed NTI, asking what the problem might be. They still have not responded five days later. The error message is not in the manual.

When you create the disaster diskette boot set, it doesn't tell you in advance how many diskettes you need to format. If there is a problem, it waits until you've created the last diskette, then gives the easily misread message that you "have unsuccessfully created boot diskettes" instead of saying that the operation failed.

When I inserted a diskette that wasn't blank, to be made into a boot diskette, it somehow locked up my floppy drive so completely that I had to completely shutdown my computer to get it back. Just restarting Windows wasn't enough.

If you are an expert user, this is great software. If you're not expert, stay away.

By Marin Web Works - Dec 3, 2004