It may have silly capitals and punctuation in its hyperbolic title, but this backup package performs in a simple and no-nonsense manner. Read our Australian review.

Backups for enterprise level customers are big, big business. At the smaller end of town, however, there's less attention paid to keeping data safe and secure. Sure, your own work and files may be worth less fiscally than those of BHP, but you can kick yourself just as hard as a BHP technician can when you lose it all.

NTI Backup NOW! Deluxe may have silly capitilisation and extraneous exclamation marks in the title, but it's actually a quite down to earth utility for backing up files and drives to CD-R/RW media. CD-R/RW isn't the best archival format out there -- it's all too easy to damage the media, for a start. It is, however, relatively cheap and ubiquitous. According to Quadtel, Backup NOW! Deluxe doesn't support DVD burning in the current release -- maybe next time.

Like a lot of software these days, upon opening the box you discover that you've just purchased a large amount of air wrapped around a single CD in a plastic slick. A manual is provided in PDF format, and is in reasonable detail. It's 85 pages long, though, which is a little long to read onscreen and also a touch long for most people's printing patience -- you get the worst of both worlds.

Thankfully, the software itself is mostly self explanatory, so the number of times you'd need to refer to the manual are fairly small. Installation offers you the option to run NTI Backup NOW! Deluxe in either English or Japanese, as well as running a trial version of NTI CD-Maker 2000 Professional.

On first launch, you're given the option to do a simple file backup or restore, or a drive image backup or restore. Given the size of hard drives, we'd be surprised if too many people had drives small enough to be compressed safely onto a single CD-R/RW, although you could always opt for a multi-disc backup set.

The interface itself looks like a modified Windows Explorer menu, with large friendly buttons down the left hand side. The first step in a backup set is to select the files you want backed up via checkboxes. The second step requests a filename for the set, and confirms which burning drive you wish to use for this process. Finally you pick your compression options, and whether to only back up files that have changed since your last backup was performed. Backups can be password protected, specific files can be excluded, and you have the option to either overwrite or append if you're using CD-RW media.

NTI Backup NOW! Deluxe can wipe CD-RW discs if needed as part of the backup process. It will then copy the data and do a comparison of files. This isn't an entirely quick process; on our test system with a 16x RW burner it took better than twenty minutes to complete the process. A report is generated at the end of each run, and reports can be reviewed if you suspect something's gone wrong but can't quite pick when. For our small test set of 670MB, we ended up with a compressed 472MB file. That's not extraordinary, but at the same time it's reasonable. The size of your backup set will vary widely depending on the existing compression within your files.

Backup Deluxe hides its backup files once burnt. As a result, our backup discs only appeared to have very small files placed upon them. A quick check of the properties box reveals zero free space on the discs, but unless you named your backup accordingly it would be all too easy for someone to inadvertently wipe your entire archive without realising it.

One thing that slightly irked us was that Backup NOW! Deluxe doesn't provide an ongoing tally of file sizes. It's only when you come to the burning stage that you're presented with an approximate number of discs required. If you don't happen to have a CD-R/RW disc in the drive before coming to this step, you'll be met with a polite error message, which means you've got to have a disc present to even see how many discs you might need. A dialogue reminding you to put in a CD would be of great use here.

There are issues with using CD-R/RW as backup media; CDs generally aren't kept as well as backup tapes and other media. Then again, Backup NOW! Deluxe doesn't pitch itself at the big end of storage requirements; it's more in the Home/SOHO market, something for which it's quite well suited.

NTI Backup NOW! Deluxe
Company: NewTech Infosystems
Price: AU$99.95
Distributor: Quadtel Marketing Results
Phone: 02 8852 4600

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