BackUp My PC

Company: Stomp Inc.
Product: BackUp My PC
Street Price: ~$79 on CD, $69 Download From Website
Date Reviewed: December 31, 2002
Reviewed By: Vinny D.

Introduction:

Back a few years ago, when most people had a system crash, the biggest thing they lost was some save game files and maybe a few term papers. Things have changed greatly in the past few years and people are doing their accounting, taxes, address books and everything else on their PC's. It could be even worse for someone who uses a PC for a home business, because it would take weeks to re-enter all the the data they could have lost in a crash.

Data backup is even more important for those of us who overclock our PC's. Overclocking casualties are becoming more and more common the more extreme we get. Every person that I know who overclocks their PC can attribute at least one system crash or registry corruption to overclocking.

Today I am going to be reviewing a new product by Stomp called BackUp My PC. The name pretty much says everything about the program, a simple name for an extreme simple yet powerful piece of software..

System Requirements & Specifications:
  64MB Ram Minimum
  166Mhz Pentium Minimum
  50MB Hard Drive Space
  Windows 9x, ME, NT 4.0, 2000 or XP

"One Touch" creation of disaster recovery disks. Disaster recovery for Windows XP is only supported with a free upgrade from Stomp's Website.
Unattended automatic backups so you can be sure your system is backed up regularly and at your convenience.
Ability to do Differential and Incremental backups.
Support for all common back up devices and automatic detection of those devices.
Hardware and Software compression to maximize media efficiency.
Supports file verification and logging so you can be sure that your backups are valid.

Installation:

Upon opening the box of software I was greeted by a more complete user manual that I could ever imagine. The manual is 134 pages long and covers anything you would ever want to know about the software and it's use. Everything is explained step by step with pictures so that a six year old could figure out how to use the software.

Installation of this software is very basic and straight forward. After loading the CD you will see a browse window that will allow you to easily install both the backup software and it's companion StorageGuard software. Click on Install and hit next a few times and the installation is complete.

StorageGuard Use:

StorageGuard is the companion program to Backup My PC. This program serves as a launcher for Backup My PC. It also auto-updates the software and tells you how much of your data has a current backup. You have the option of whether or not you want StorageGuard to load with windows.

Storage guard is not required for Backup My PC to run nor does it change the way it operates at all. I personally chose not to have it load upon windows start but for someone who wants their data constantly monitored and backed up then this would be perfect for them.

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