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Instant backup software for 99 cents
What's almost as good as freeware? How about 99-cent software that's available for Windows and Macs and that constantly backs up your files in the background? NTI Shadow 2 does just that for under a buck. It works with any attached drives, including pen drives, MP3 players and, of course, hard drives.
You can set it to immediately back up changed files or make the back ups every certain number of minutes. Everything happens in the background unless you want it to open a window to display a progress bar. I had a good experience with the Windows version saving to a second hard drive, but couldn't get the Mac version to work across a LAN because of networking problems on my end.
The 99-cent deal ends on Dec. 31, when the price returns to $29.95. The 90-day special is an effort by NTI to attract customers to the site to possibly purchase other products, including its traditional backup application called NTI Backup Now! 4.0. But you might find that the 99-cent version is enough back-up power for you.
Comments
10
Subscribe to commentsWhiskyDec 12th 2005 5:54PM
I use SyncBack Freeware and it works wonderfully.
PeterDec 12th 2005 6:20PM
It's certainly not as full featured as some other backup software and the interface is a little rough, but it's certainly better than nothing. I've spent a dollar on less useful stuff. For anyone who isn't backing up, now there isn't any excuse.
MartinDec 12th 2005 8:14PM
Nice tip, though I'm pretty sure Cobian backup can compete with this feature list and it's free.
daltonDec 13th 2005 7:20AM
I use a Mac, so SilverKeeper or IMSafe have been working pretty well for me, but I like the "always on" feature of this software. What the heck, I'll drop the 99 large.
nemiDec 13th 2005 4:09PM
Get the Widnows Server 2003 tools from MS web site (free downalod, works with XP).
Use the RoboCopy.exe (Robust Copy) command line tool. (support differential backups and so many great options)
Write simple batch scritps for your backups and schedule them with Windows Scheduler.
I use this solution on all my PC's now and it works great.
PeterDec 13th 2005 8:56PM
Nemi - Everything you say is true, but let's be honest, how many people are going to write batch scripts to do backups? For the more technical users it's a great idea. For the noob who doesn't back up at all, trying to get them to use batch scripts, task scheduler and command line tools isn't going to work.
JakeGDec 14th 2005 2:56PM
Saw this post, sprung for the 99 cent software mainly because I'm always looking for different options for this sort of thing. Decided I'd check this out mainly for a simple way to keep the documents on my wife's laptop backed up to our home server.
Let's just say, I can see why they are giving it away for 99 cents. If I paid $30 for this software, I'd be demanding my money back. Zero configurability. Zero options for the type of syncronization to perform--so far as I can tell, it tried 1 time to clone the source directory to the newly created backup directory--once I cancelled that, it only updated a file if/when it was modified. It was impossible to determine what the program was doing at any given point, if anything at all.
If you're looking for software to do what NTI Shadow could do if it was more than a skeleton of a program (2.0?? I can only imagine how pathetic 1.0 was...) you should check out SyncBack freeware as #1 mentioned, or the commandline xxcopy utility. I don't know if either is configurable to run "on the fly", but either is easy enough to set up to run at start-up, shut-down, or with the task scheduler. I use xxcopy at work to synch 300GB+ shared NTFS directories to backup servers, all by typing "xxcopy source_dir dest_dir /CLONE" and pressing enter.
Losing 99 cents to this software wasn't a big deal, but NTI should be ashamed promoting software as incomplete as this at any price.
Todd W. CarterDec 14th 2005 3:02PM
Admittedly, it's not a full-featured program. But it is only 99 cents. PC World magazine gave it a horrible review, before the 99-cent deal was out. But so far it has done what I expected it to do on my machine.
JakeGDec 15th 2005 2:34PM
No, it is certainly not a full-featured program. My point was, it is barely a shell of a program at all, more like an alpha than anything that should actually be released. And, even for 99 cents, it would be nice if it even approached the functionality of even the most basic comparable free software...
Give away a decent basic utility, or even sell it for a couple of bucks, and you'll attract customer interest in your other, normally-priced software. Ask people to pay, even 99 cents, for this shoddy piece of work, and I'd wager you're driving future customers away, not attracting them.
MichaelDec 16th 2005 6:31AM
It is an excellent way to promote your better product by giving away a cheaper product. We give away free backup utilities for various programs, just to compliment our backup software app at http://www.365backup.com/