Product Reviews

There may be no shortage of data backup and management options on the Mac for the consumer, the small office and home office setup. But in the business world the choice is more limited.

Archiware's PresStore, however, is one - aimed at the professional Mac and mixed platform environment. In its third version, this is a significantly detailed backup and archiving and synchronisation application.

The supplied software CD contains installers for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and Solaris. In the case of the Mac OS version, PresStore installs itself and a background server. It is accessed via a web-based user interface for configuring scheduled backups, connecting to tape drives and synchronisation settings

Numerous tape drives are supported. Rather than focusing on specific brands PresStore works with any drive that adheres to any of a range of popular tape drive standards including AIT 1-5, various flavours of DLT including SuperDLT, LTO, Dat and DDS up to DDS 4. Configuring PresStore to use a backup device, whether tape or a hard drive, is straightforward, but does require quite a few mouse clicks.

The structure of PresStore is very logical, with functionality sitting under sensible headings. To add a device, for example, you go to First Steps then Configure Storage Device from the sidebar menu. A window opens where you can enter the path to the chosen storage drive, and set limits on the amount of space PresStore can use on that drive for backing up data. You can also label the volume as a Backup or Archive volume to prevent mixing data types.

Creating a backup plan follows a similar line but this is where the extensive configuration capability of the product begins to show through. The administrator is able to define very granular settings over what gets backed up or archived, when, to where and how often the backup is required to recur. The basic but clear

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user interface can soon get bogged down in a sea of tick boxes, drop downs and radio buttons as a result. Thus it is best to go into the process of setting backup plans, having clearly sketched out what you want to do first.

The version of PresStore you opt for will determine whether you just have basic backup capability contained within the software licence, or dedicated archival data management and file/machine synchronisation support. Perhaps the most powerful feature within PresStore 3 is Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Think of this as an enterprise version of Apple's Time Machine backup function. CDP continuously synchronises the data from one machine to another or to a dedicated synchronisation drive. After the initial sync, only new or changed files are transferred, ensuring that the destination drive always has the most recent version of the host machine's files available, allowing for single file or complete system recovery.

At a file level PresStore can backup open files even on Windows machines - this means that scheduled backups remain complete and do not fail because data is being worked on.

Encryption and security are in place at every step of the PresStore application. As well as being fully integrated with Unix user/group management schemes for permissions support and access control, file level access rights are maintained on restored data. Stored and transferred data can be done so in an encrypted state or in the clear, depending on the need and the security risk.

With creative environments in mind, PresStore has one particularly useful feature for browsing archived content - picture thumbnails and video previews can still be accessed while data is in its archived state.

The depth of configuration options doesn't just stop with the software itself. PresStore 3 ranges from the basic Workgroup Edition covering five device licences - your mixture of servers and clients - and single tape drive support to the XXL edition at £5888 (£5011 ex VAT). The latter includes backup, synchronisation and archive licences as well as two media drive licences and unlimited tape slot support.

For a small business or one pushing around huge volumes of data in areas such as publishing, graphic design and video, PresStore offers unrivalled capability and control over data storage and recovery. And it helps to demystify the actual content being archived. But it does need thorough configuration to get the best out of it.