Sunday, September 07, 2008

Possibly the most useless piece of software ever?

After my disaster with my PC, I have brought an external disk. A nice 500GB drive from Freecom. Now I can have the software that come with it backup my files. If anything happens they will be up to date and available on my other PC's.

The backup software 'NTI Shadow 3' is pretty basic, as you'd expect. I set up a simple backup and off it went. So far so good. I set up another job and deselected a number of directories that I don't really care if they are backued up. The software generated a list of selected directories (so how will it detect any new ones?) and proceeded to back them all up to the same directory
e.g. Peter is one of the selected directories.
C:\Users\Peter\Dir A
C:\Users\Peter\Dir B
at the destination I have Dir A, and Dir B, and multiple copies of them - very confusing. I was expecting Peter\Dir A.
Now I've changed from USB to network, I keep being told there's a network error, and Shadow has terminated, or I'm given a list of open files it can't copy. I thought shadow was supposed to allow the copy of open file, I thought that was the reason for its existance!

I have now returned to Cobian, although the shadow function doesn't seem to work there either, at least it failure doesn't kill the whol process.

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