Labs

When we reviewed nsure:express in What's New, Shopper 240, the entry-level 2GB package cost £2 a month. We concluded that it needed some improvements before we could recommend it.

While some of the other software here could best be described as simple, nsure is positively basic. With no scheduling options and no background backup facilities, it's more of an online storage application than a true backup program. Unfortunately,

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it's not a particularly good one. There are virtually no options, and although you make backups by dragging and dropping files into the application, you can't restore them in the same way. There's no in-application help, but you can download a PDF file.

The package doesn't use much system memory, but it made our test computer's 2.66GHz processor work flat out during backups and restores, while the system became very slow to respond during the former. It was the only application here that couldn't identify files that had already been backed up, so on our second backup it uploaded more than eight times as much data as SquirrelSave, stopping to ask us whether we wanted to replace files as it went. We chose to restore only our deleted documents folder and its contents. This was comparatively painless, but not especially fast.

For £25 a year, nsure offers only as much backup space as iDrive and Mozy's free packages. Although neither is perfect, both are better than nsure:express, which we still can't recommend.