NovaBackup

Pros

Only good for copying files from long directories.

Cons

My novastor back up caused me a major issue!!!! I made a back up of my storage drives to do some maintenance on them. Those drives had my lifetime work on it, personal documentations, important taxes documents, receipts... basically very important things. After I created a back up file, I double checked the size and double checked if it opens and runs. Did maintenance on my drives, reinstalled windows. Came to restoring the file and boom, it won't work!!!! It runs for about 30 seconds as it's recovering and then it just stops and either freezes or just never stops and runs like that forever or just give me a report "Error e001000b: The specified media could not be found. - Job processing failure". I've contacted the support and apparently the company is in Germany and they only have one guy here in US who never got in contact back with me. The support from Germany never resolved anything, but forced me to buy an update on the program and after an update, support just said "Oh well, if

Summary

My novastor back up caused me a major issue!!!! I made a back up of my storage drives to do some maintenance on them. Those drives had my lifetime work on it, personal documentations, important taxes documents, receipts... basically very important things. After I created a back up file, I double checked the size and double checked if it opens and runs. Did maintenance on my drives, reinstalled windows. Came to restoring the file and boom, it won't work!!!! It runs for about 30 seconds as it's recovering and then it just stops and either freezes or just never stops and runs like that forever or just give me a report "Error e001000b: The specified media could not be found. - Job processing failure". I've contacted the support and apparently the company is in Germany and they only have one guy here in US who never got in contact back with me. The support from Germany never resolved anything, but forced me to buy an update on the program and after an update, support just said "Oh well, if file is corrupt, we can't help you, you should always have an extra back up for youfself". It's not even a joke, this program is advertised as #1 rated back up system and its not just that program doesn't work properly, they also charge you for it and miss-advertise so called "Support team" that doesn't exist and doesn't do anything to resolve the problem. I like how they say they will perform teamviewer session to take care of the problem. No matter how many times I requested for it, I never g

Pros

You can backup with multiple scenarios in an easy to use interface. Much easier to navigate than the standard server backup software being added.

Cons

Takes a little while to get on to. Make sure you click the save icon after all changes as there is no prompt to save. When creating a second backup job make sure you click new or you just overwrite your first job.

Summary

The software has a quick learning curve and the support staff are very helpful. My experiences contacting their helpdesk were a thousand times better than Symantec.

Pros

Scheduling works great. I found the configuration and error tolerance settings for the back-ups robust and well optioned.

Cons

I had a catastrophic hard drive failure, restoring files from the back-up is a long, multi-step process involving first importing your backup off of whatever media it was on (which, let me tell you, if you have a rather large amount of data, takes a very long time) then, once you've imported the file, you then restore the data (which once again, takes a very, very, long time if you have quite a lot of data).

Summary

It did its job exactly as advertised, but the back-up restoration process could be much smoother, it was enough of a chore to get everything back together after a hdd failure without having to effectively load your data backup twice in order to retrieve your files.

Pros

+ full feature Backup/Restore package
+ creates DR copy quickly, especially compared to regular incremental backups
+ client is fully back level compatible for restoring backups from old versions
+ upgrade is cost effective for multiple workstations
+ integrated Anti Virus (AV) scanning
+ works well with iSCSI NAS, especially with dedupe & compression enabled on the NAS (ZFS on EonNAS or NAS4Free)
+ matures support for HyperV and VMware (ESXi) VMs

Cons

- not the fastest Backup/Restore tool around
- did away with chunking option creating partial backup files up to 2GB , big mistake IMO
- compression adds heavy overhead to backup process, on a quad core 3GHz i5 Windows 7 machine with 16GB memory with RAID10 USB3 attached a 10x slowdown when compression is enabled, better to enable on your NAS to compress (only 3x slower with NAS compression on Gb network)
- heavy duty marketing and e-mail blitzes come often!
- Central Management Console no longer separate product or affordable for SMB/SOHO, part of much higher price NB for NAS

Summary

Net: good stable package, full feature, reasonable price especially for upgrade (now at v17).

I have been a long time user of NovaBackup, so familiarity is a major plus. All of our workstations are covered, and multiple NovaBackup licenses are bundled with some popular NAS offerings (Buffalo Technologies). I have used v11 (bundled), v12 (free upgrade), v14 (bundled) and now v17 (group upgrade). I have tried 4 competitors over the past couple of years and though 3 are faster and one more comprehensive, none were as stable as v14 or v17 of NovaBackup on Windows 7 and now Windows 8.1 and 10. The DR DVD build option works well now. However the former growth path for SOHO or small SMB customers is gone. Current NovaBackup for NAS prices put this out of reach for most SOHO/sSMB.

Pros

Well, it seems to work, but I won't know until my HDD crashes. So, benefit of the doubt, that's at least a 3.

Cons

It is unclear (to me, a novice) what I had to do to recover from a HDD crash. You can make a "Backup", but I don't think that works. You need a "Disaster Recovery" something.. FAQ and manuals assume too much. Written for fellow software engineers, I think.

Summary

It sounds like it should be a good product, but I have been waiting 3 days now for a quick answer to a simple question. You can "buy" support, but shouldn't you get the basics included? Not at all impressed with customer support.

Pros

-Easy
-Good Flow
-Price
-All Inclusive
-US Support!

Cons

Nothing to report.

Pros

Runs every night without fail. Set up for cycle of 1 full-backup, 6 incrementals, then repeat.cycle.

Cons

My only problem was getting the backups setup like I wanted. A bit complex until you do it a few times.

Summary

Recommend 1-terrabyte or larger backup destination (depending on size of backups). I have a 3-terrabyte internal unit. My database is 70gigabytes.

Pros

For me, everything worked like I expected. I set up an automatic daily incremental backup and did a test restore to another location after a few days. Worked without any hassle. It runs every night and only takes a few minutes to update the incremental (I am getting notices of successful backups).

Cons

None that I know of.

Pros

Backs up (or at least appears to)

Cons

At least 8 bugs or serious issues that I found.

Summary

Don't depend on Novastor to be there when you need it. I used version 14, 15, 16.1, and 16.5. They all backed up fine giving me a false sense of security but when I needed to restore my data, all versions failed to restore my registry and COM. This left my copy of Windows unstable. After a week of trying to find a fix, tech support was no help.

Next issue was their disaster recovery feature (even though I had made a disaster disc) could not utilize my last full back up. You must know to do a special full disc disaster back up for that (along with another set of full back ups if you should ever want to restore individual files--so you'll need twice the backup storage and time). This forced me to reinstalled Windows fresh, but after that, restoring my registry backup still failed even with their latest version.

Among the eight bugs I encountered, one of the worst ones was discovering that Novastor requires you to import each of your backups back into their "index" before you can restore. My 1.6TB full backup took 14 hours to "import", and another 14 hours to restore! But that was the easy part. I had 80 incremental daily backups. (Which by the way, if you accumulate too many, their time based restore slows to a crawl and becomes unusable)

The bigger problem is after a clean reinstall (or disaster recovery), you can't restore your daily backups until you import them and you must do that one daily backup at a time (No way to just say import them all and walk away). So, depending on how many dailies you have, the entire process can take hours to days of pressing buttons in front of the computer, waiting for the import to finish, and repeating, so be forewarned! (Or use differential which is what tech support told me after the fact) Worst thing is that these and other issues seem to persist from one upgrade to the next. Therefore, they would seem to be in no hurry to fix them. I will never trust Novastor again.