| mad1@columbia.edu 2006-09-03, 1:15 am |
| Genie Backup Manager Professional 7.0 review: Too many bugs
02-Sep-2006 09:54:44 PM
Pros: As far as I can tell, the basic, full backups were done
accurately, in a nonproprietary format that makes it easy to find and
retrieve a particular file you are looking for.
Cons: I purchased the "Pro" version of GBM because I wanted to do
differential backups. But it does not work as specified, at least not
with the jobs I created on my computer. It backed up files that were
not changed since the last full backup.
After you do the first run of a backup job, a differential backup is
supposed to back up only the changed files, but it backs up everything
again (with some, but not all, jobs). This problem is reported over and
over on Genie-Soft's user forums.
And in backing up to multiple CDs, the write operation consistently
failed, on my drive, after the first CD.
Their tech support advice is minimal and unclear. Because of the time
difference, it typically takes a day for them to read what you write to
them, and often they just don't read it carefully, wasting a day at a
time. Often their advice does not focus on the problem; they get
distracted with procedures like scheduling and purging that don't fix
anything because the basic problem is still there. I went round and
round with them for over two months, and more problems appeared in the
supposedly improved software.
Buggy, confusing, untold hours of frustration, a tremendous waste of
time and discs. To their credit, they finally gave me a refund (after
many weeks of pleading on my part, and broken promises from tech
support; it took them over a month from the time a refund was promised
to issue a credit).
My advice: don't give them your money in the first place.
It's like you're doing beta testing for them.
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