Backing up data is really important. I learned that the hard way when the power went out while I was working on a list of my Neopet Dave's likes and dislikes and food allergies. When I rebooted, the list was gone, never to be found again, and my Neopet Dave died shortly thereafter when I fed him some lobster, forgetting that he was allergic to them. I'll never forget the way his tiny, pixellated eyes stared up at me in horror, their betrayal reflected in the watery discharge that preceeded his violent and agonizing demise.

I'll miss you Dave, you magical ostrich...

Anyway, let's look at WinBackup 2.0 and see if it can save some lives!

Because we didn't get a review copy of the Server version of the software, I decided to test it out on my home computer: a machine that's so riddled with Neopet corpses and high-grade pornography that it tips to the side when it boots up. It's frightening. Anyway, after a standard and not crashing installation, this is the screen that greeted me when I clicked on its icon:



There's a nice little photo of a life preserver! I suppose they've gone with the metaphor that you're in need of a life preserver to cling to when you're floating in a sea of unprotected data. I have (I'm sorry, had) an uncle who drowned in a swimming competition in the Dead Sea, so I found this very offensive and broke into tears and cried until I threw up.

The GUI (that's graphical user interface if you've never seen a computer or an acronym before) of WinBackup 2.0 is nice and straightforward, which is good, because the average computer user seems to like yelling at the monitor and sweating more than reading. That's actually what I'm doing right now. You start the backup process by coming up with a clever name for your backup file. I chose 'GTGtest' because I'm hilarious.

Here you can see me selecting the files I want to backup--they're ROMs of old Nintendo games, and they're possibly illegal, but don't worry: after I backed them up, I deleted them right off my hard drive! Actually, now that I look at it, the first file isn't a ROM, but some kind of crazy stats thing. I guess I should look at what I'm checking off when I use download managers.

Picking the directory I'm saving to is equally simple:



Then it comes time to select the settings of my job. This is also really straightforward, as you can see here:

When selecting your backup type, you can choose either Total (which is all your selected files, like the screenshot says) or Incremental (which is all the files that are new or modified); I chose Total so I would never again lose another friend.

The backup ran like it said it would, and although it wasn't blazing fast or anything--especially since I had selected the option to verify my files against the originals for the sake of consistency and arbitrariness--but it got the job done in a reasonable amount of time. Here it is, chugging away at helping me break the law(?):

When it was finished, I deleted the files from their original location and clicked over to the Run Restore tab to see if I could get them back. I did!

And so there was a happy ending after all! Or wait, was there? What if I had a problem in the future? Who would help me and guide me by the hand in a good way? What's this? A help menu?



Yep, it's a fairly comprehensive help menu for WinBackup 2.0. It's simple, clear, and ultimately answered any questions I might have. Well, that's not true. It didn't give me the help I needed in my most dire hour.



My final thoughts:

When it comes right down to it, aren't we all floating on a sea of unprotected data? At any second, our computer boat could spring a leak and the data could go leaking out all over the sea...wait, no, that doesn't make sense. The sea leaks into the sea? Crap, I wanted to make an Exxon joke. Anyway, WinBackup 2.0 sells for some amount of money that you should probably pay if you're reading this review.