Product Reviews

Sadly, despite being pitched as "the easiest way for consumers to preserve, protect and restore their critical data", Sonic's Backup MyPC Deluxe 6 does not live up to this.

Granted, it makes efforts to be user friendly. Two wizards handle backups and restoring, but both resort to the standard folder tree and tick box device, in a cramped, non-resizable window. This makes things awkward enough, but for a program pitched at consumers, it's an oversight not to present the My Documents folder as a top-level one alongside My Computer. Instead, you browse to the C:Documents and Settingsusername folder

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to back up your work, which is hardly intuitive.

Given the intended audience, we would have liked to see it handle the more arcane backup practices automatically. For example, there's no indication that you have to perform a full backup before switching to an incremental or differential one. Performing an incremental backup first puts the program through the motions but doesn't actually back up any files. Do it in the right order, and you're prompted to overwrite the original backup, rendering the new incremental backup useless. You need to change the incremental backup's filename before you carry it out, but this is far from obvious.

The Disaster Recovery feature allows you to restore a new, working but empty hard disk back to the state it was in when your last backup was made. It works with Windows XP restore discs too, a nice touch given that genuine installation CDs are rare. But you can't use it without creating four restore floppies first, even though these aren't always needed. The restore process also requires the user to manually repartition the hard disk to match the state it was in when the backup was made, which will leave many users scratching their heads.