NOVA BACKUP PROFESSIONAL
|Review – 1
If you’ve used backup software before, this is pretty good software. The setup is simple and easy to navigate, you select your files, select destination location and boom. There really isn’t much to it. Nice you can go to tape, disc, hard drive, network drive. You can also do disk imaging with it.
You DO need to have some knowledge of backups to use effectively though, if you don’t know the difference between a full and incremental job, this software doesn’t tell you. I suppose you need SOME level of backup experience to use it or you may find it confusing. Not really a fault of the product but i suppose they could have made it more idiot proof. My sister couldn’t figure out how to get it to work but it took me only a few minutes.
Review – 2
After purchasing a Buffalo 4TB NAS I was excited to try yet another backup solution that promised simplicity, reliability and unattended backups of full system images. The user interface was extremely simple and offered advanced users the option of displaying a more thorough menu.
Here’s the problem – the interface is so simple that maybe I should have done some research before attempting to create a full system image. I selected “System Image” and pointed the backup to a network device. I was immediately prompted to reboot so Nova could copy all system files upon reboot. I rebooted and…….nothing. Screen was black with the gut-sickening blinking cursor AND with a single dot below it. Multiple reboots and attempts to go into Safe Mode, System Restore..etc, all resulted in the cursor/dot black screen. There was no way Windows was going to load in any fashion.
I used a Hiren’s boot disk to boot into Windows 7, removed Nova completely (including all traces in the registry). Again booting up failed with the same symptom.
Next I booted from a Windows 7 DVD and went into the repair console. Ran bootexec.exe and lo and behold, Nova had changed the target partition to D: from C: – seemingly a strange and lazy way to get to system files on boot. I ran fixmbr from the repair disc and ultimately repaired the boot record.
Contrast that experience with using the built in Windows Backup and Restore (which is free). Go to Start/Backup and Restore and select Backup my System, then create system image. Windows uses the Volume Shadow Service to do a complete image WITHOUT a reboot. It’s running beautifully right now.
Nova seems like a redundant product now that Windows 7 includes all the same functionality in a safer, more intuitive environment.
Pricing
The pricing rage of this product is very attractive and cost affective, the cast is around 40$ which is pretty must 30 to 40 percent les than any other known backup solution.
Here is some interface take from application