Product Reviews

Making regular backups of your system and data on your hard disk is very sensible, but what if the disk fails? You could write your data to multiple optical discs instead, but it's more hassle and they could still be damaged or lost in a fire. If you have a fast broadband connection, there is another way. The BackupMyStuff service provides 2GB of storage and the software to back up your PC over the internet.

While 2GB is more than enough space for documents, it's not enough to back up an entire PC, operating system and all. Those with large MP3 and photo collections will fill this space quickly. You can pay for more storage, but this soon gets expensive.

We had trouble getting the client software to work on either of the two PCs we tried - one at work and one at home. Both failed during the connection process, reporting that they couldn't detect an internet connection. We weren't given the option to retry or specify a proxy server and could only quit. To try again we had to start the application from scratch. We eventually traced the problem to our router's firewall

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configuration and set it to let BackupMyStuff through. We had to phone technical support to get the configuration information we needed, as the website and documentation don't provide it.

Once we had configured our firewall, the software made a connection and the application started. This is easy to use. The Quick Start Wizard finds data files automatically, and uploading them takes just a couple of mouse clicks. When we tried this method, it generated a list of 1.3GB worth of files to upload. We used a 2Mbit/s broadband connection, which sounds as if it should make short work of this amount of data. Sadly, 2Mbit/s is the download speed. As we were uploading, we were limited to our broadband connection's slow 200Kbit/s. This took 14 hours and gobbled up a hefty chunk of our 2GB quota of available space.

A better option would be to save just My Documents and Outlook email, but this isn't easy. The Explorer-style view is difficult to use and doesn't list My Documents as a high-level folder. Instead, you have to browse your hard disk to find it. Even then, selecting a folder and choosing files is a drawn out process and not as simple as it is with other utilities such as Windows Backup. The view doesn't make it obvious which files are selected. Restoring files is much quicker: you can select an individual file (from one of up to seven versions) or restore everything. If your PC has died, though, there's not much you can do.

Online backup is a great idea that just doesn't work in the home environment. We recommend a combination of Acronis True Image and an external hard disk instead. This gives a complete backup and works out much cheaper.