MSP360 Backup

Strengths:

• Very robust; can look through files and file versions at will, without having to sacrifice block-level backups or differential backups. The developers understand that these special features are not mutually exclusive.

• Encryption makes a backup truly uncrackable without the right password. In fact, paths become so ridiculously long and scrambled with encryption enabled that the backup folder cannot even be opened with Windows Explorer (not that there is anything of interest to see in there, as everything is encrypted, including the backup plan itself).

• Granular event logs and reports.

• Consistency checks ensure that the data held by the backup locations are sane.

• Great effort placed into Amazon Glacier integration to minimize download costs just to retrieve a single file from a very large backup.

• Integration with both consumer storage services and enterprise storage services that I have never heard of.

Weaknesses:

• UI is undeveloped and does not clearly explain your choices. Sometimes, it gives you too much control; other times, it gives you too little.

• Application often loses track of backup progress, as it is just a frontend to the system service that does the heavy lifting.

• You can't turn existing backups into hybrid backups or archives. It will simply ask you to do a full backup again.

• You can't upload file-level backups to the cloud as an archive. It needs to have been an archive in the first place, but you can't do that without changing the settings and doing a full backup again (see last point).

• No clear assurance that cloud archive backups are resilient/resumable after simply restarting the computer.

This is a perfect application for anyone who wants to back up their data easily and cheaply to Amazons S3. We have been using this for over a year on an elderly Win 2003 server, and it runs as it should. It is easy to use, and does what it should.

This looked really promising, everything is easy to set up, software seems stable and well-written, etc.

But then I look at my Amazon Glacier billing, and it's only uploaded 2 GiB (costs $0.02 per month to store) but it's made 50,000 requests in the process, costing me $3 for the requests alone. What is it doing, uploading every single file individually?! I'm not spending $300 per month for requests! It should be combining all the files into large compressed archives and uploading the archives, not individual files.