NovaStor NovaBackup Software Review

NovaStor is a California company with 15 years experience in providing backup solutions. NovaBackup 7.0 itself, is a very ambitious product that tries hard to be everything to everybody and surprisingly, it almost succeeds.

NovaBackup is a highly capable backup program with many extra features such as a virus scanner and the ability to create an image file of your boot disk drive. However the overly complex user interface is likely to confuse many beginners. Price is also an issue with the workstation version at $79.95 and the server version at $149.95. However they do offer competitive upgrades from other publishers’ backup programs, which is a very rare thing these days.

You can use four different backup methods with this program - Full, Incremental, Differential, and ‘Snap Shot’. Once the backup set is defined, you get your choice of running the set immediately or at a scheduled time.

The program will back up to almost any destination you can imagine, including CD, CD-RW, DVD, network drives, network attached storage, and even tape drives. It’s worth noting that it records CD-R’s without pre-formatting.

This program has a dizzying array of features and options (available for setting under View/Global Settings). You can set the backup type, virus scanning options, encryption of the data, how to handle the logs, which files to ignore (the program comes with a default list), and any custom programs you’d like to run before or after the backup, such as a drive defragmenter.

While useful to the advanced user, many of these options would be daunting to a beginner who would be best advised to stick with the backup wizard.

NovaBackup comes with a copy of InstantRecovery Personal, which makes a drive image of your boot volume, so that you can create a disaster recovery file.

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