BounceBack Ultimate review

The world isn't short of backup packages, but BounceBack has an unusual feature: it allows you to duplicate your entire operating system onto an external USB-connected hard drive. If disaster strikes, you can simply boot from your backup drive and keep on working - and restore your original disk in the background.

It sounds like a good idea, and it's implemented with a creditable focus on ease of use. Once you've specified an external drive as a system backup destination, the software will automatically update your archive whenever you connect it. To that extent, it's similar to the approach chosen by ClickFree - but while their system requires you to buy a ClickFree hard disk, BounceBack works with any external hard disk.

The software also adds a boot-time menu option that allows you to boot directly from your backup disk, so you don't need to mess around in the BIOS to recover your system.

For smaller-scale protection, BounceBack also supports custom backup sets, with optional support for versioning, encryption or synchronisation between multiple PCs (though oddly you can only pick one of these options for a given set). These sets can also automatically update whenever you connect your drive, or you can preset a schedule.

BounceBack suffers from a few inescapable limitations. Making your backup drive bootable necessarily involves reformatting it, so you'll lose any data that's already there. And the files on it are naturally not encrypted in any way, so it's not ideal for storing sensitive data on a portable device.

Other shortcomings, though, seem more avoidable. It's odd that you can't use an internal drive for a full system backup. And there's no support for online backups at all, beyond the ability to choose a networked volume as a source or destination for a backup set.

These omissions might be incidental in a free or cheap package, but at £54 BounceBack is a lot more expensive than our A List choice, Acronis True Image 2009. The cheaper Essential edition drops the custom file backup features for a reduced price of around £24, but it's still hardly a bargain.

Factor in an amateurish front-end that entirely ignores the Windows UI guidelines and you're left with a package that's well-intentioned but offers neither the looks nor the function to fully justify its price.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith