BackMaster 4.01 Provides Bare-Metal Restore

MSR Development Corporation has released BackMaster 4.01 for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. This is a reasonably full-featured backup product that includes file versioning, scheduled backups, open file backup, full/incremental/differential backups, etc. You can see our tabulation of their feature list over here

The company claims to provide more speed than the competition, with backups to external USB 2.0 hard drives running at 600MB/minute, and restores at up to 1GB/minute. That's presumably a big YMMV, as I'm guessing my little 5400RPM Western Digital pocket drive won't go that fast!

But the thing that really distinguishes this product from most of the overcrowded sub-$100 backup product market is bare-metal restore. BackMaster lets you burn a recovery CD that can be used to get back up and running after you put in a new, empty hard disk to replace the one that died. The recovery CD includes a disk partitioning utility, and can even handle SATA drives without requiring the dreaded drivers-on-a-floppy. This can save a lot of time over having to re-install Windows from scratch on an empty drive and then install your backup software before you can even start restoring your backed-up data.

As usual, the drawback of bare-metal restore is that virtually no one will ever have the time and resources to test it out ahead of time. Thus, if there's any glitch in the process, you'll never know until it's too late. Still, this is a feature usually associated with image-based (and more expensive) backup software, so it's good to see it show up in an affordable file-based backup package from a company with a track record in the backup software business.

BackMaster has a family-friendly license that lets you use the software on up to 3 computers in your home. The price is $59.95USD, but at the time of this writing (August 27, 2006), you can get it for the promotional price of $39.95.

See Also

• Explanation of incremental backups vs differential backups.
• The company homepage at www.msrdev.com

August