Nero BackItUp and Burn in Software

The prevalence of online backup services, and the low cost of such excellent products as Carbonite, which charges a mere US$55 for a year's worth of unlimited backup, means that developers of traditional backup software have to work really hard to justify the purchase price.

That's what Nero has attempted to do with its BackItUp and Burn product, which promises not only to deliver backup software, both local and online, but also disk imaging, synchronisation and deleted file recovery tools plus Nero Express - an optical disc authoring tool for CDs and DVDs.

It sounds enticing and it's certainly easy to use. Fire it up, select the Autobackup option, and choose the local option and it'll scan your computer for pictures, videos, documents and other important files, suggest likely candidate drives as targets then instigate an incremental backup regime for you. You need do nothing else, though you can change the schedule if you want.

Naturally, you can specify individual folders and files in the normal way as well, and there are plenty of advanced features here. Scheduling options include being able to back up only when your system has been idling for a certain period, and they can be triggered when a specific device has been plugged in, too.

You can swap between incremental, differential and update backup types depending on the amount of space you have to hand, have it send email notifications when jobs are complete, back up to network drives or FTP and control CPU priority. There's a drive imaging tool too: just point BackItUp at a partition or drive to backup, hit a button and you're away. The Sync tool allows you to keep two folders in, er, sync.

The online backup option is less tempting. You get 1GB of space for free for the first three months, but thereafter it's £70 exc VAT per year for just 25GB of space, which is just too expensive. And it's up against some stiff opposition in this sector too. The Swiss Army knife of backup tools - Acronis True Image 2009 - is our current favourite, offers all of this plus handy stuff such as the Secure Zone - a hidden partition set aside for a recovery image - and a Try and Decide mode, which allows you to try out software installation within that safe zone.

But BackItUp is cheaper the tune of £10, which makes it a decent alternative. Its online backup proposition is far too expensive - and that's the big disappointment - but elsewhere its balance of ease-of-use to advanced options is finely tuned. Worth the money.

Author: Jonathan Bray