For many of us, backups are something that we never quite get round to doing. Ability, the maker of the popular Ability Office suite, is hoping that TurboBackup will take the pain out of the process.
It's a lot easier and more flexible to use than the built-in Windows XP backup, as it can save your backups to CDs or DVDs, as well as external hard disks or designated folders.
TurboBackup is pretty easy to use and, for most people, the wizards will take care of your backup tasks. All the major bases are covered, including wizards for My Documents, photos or emails. Each task can be scheduled and you can choose how many backups you want in a set; three in a grandparent, parent, child scheme is the standard.
Should you want to do anything more complex or customise the way your files are backed up, TurboBackup rapidly gets more complicated. The software tends to leave you on your own to work things out, which is likely to confuse new users.
As well as backing up selected files, TurboBackup can also perform a system state restore, which restores system files and can get a broken PC up and running. This is somewhere between Windows' System Restore and the full restore provided by Norton Ghost 10.
Though TurboBackup is quite easy to use, a product-line Norton Ghost is better for system backups. Ghost takes a complete image of your hard disk, including installed applications and the operating system. When you run into problems, it can quickly and efficiently restore your PC back to a working state. While the first image takes up a lot of space (you'll need an external hard disk or several DVDs), its incremental scheduled backups just capture the changes in your PC, which saves disk space.
Unless you're on a very tight budget and want to save only individual files, spend a bit more on Norton Ghost 10.
BACKUP SOFTWARE Requires Windows 98 or above, 100MHz processor, 16MB RAM, 10MB disk spaceAuthor: Ursula Seymour
Ability TurboBackup