GBData review

First impressions of GBData aren't great, the service being advertised by an ugly, poorly written website. These impressions aren't dispelled by the product itself, which features the worst interface of any service on test: it's a mess of tabs, buttons and tree views that isn't even vaguely intuitive.

Work your way through it and you can see that GBData does have some solid business-friendly features, such as the option to provide an initial backup on an external hard disk or create a local copy of your online backup files. Detailed logging facilities, including email notifiers, will help small business IT managers keep track of backup jobs.

Sadly, that interface makes restoring data a painful process. It took more than 12 hours to create the initial backup, and nearly six to restore it. And while the website claims that GBData handles continuous backups, neither the client software nor the online help mentions how to enable or employ it.

GBData uses 448-bit Blowfish encryption and backs up data to a single datacenter here in the UK. Business users might also be attracted by support for Exchange Server, SQL Server, MySQL Server, Lotus Domino and Oracle Database files, or by the option to have larger backup sets provided for restore on hard disk or DVD.

You also pay for capacity, not per user, meaning that this expensive service might actually make economic sense if you have multiple users backing up small amounts of data. If not, high prices, slow speeds and a general lack of user-friendliness make GBData's offering one to avoid.

Author: Stuart Andrews