Conners Backup Exec for Windows 95 V.5.0

Quick Overview

	Widest range of devices supported.
	All users were able to make it work.
	Reinitialization of tape removes it from catalog automatically.
	Will back up over LAN.
	Maintains catalog for media, showing all files on that tape, not just the jobs.
	This was the most tested program, partly because it is the market leader. Several testers received upgrades from their Arcada 1.1 backup software.
	Most users really did not understand the program.
	Restores both Creation and Last-Modified dates.
	Conners Backup has at least one 16-bit component, which may be used only during setup and not used during backup.
	Previous version's catalogs were not converted.
	Can read catalog from medium but can't add this to its overall catalog.
	Will only read its Windows 95 tapes, not tapes from other Seagate/Arcadia versions.
	Wild time estimates, especially at start of Verification.
	Reports need manual saves and don't include media identifications.
	Limited reporting of free space on medium.
	Mysterious loss of data on tape and loss of catalog.
	Causes junk characters on printers when Windows 95 is launched. This can be fixed for systems not using parallel-port drives by renaming the extension of WINDOWS\SYSTEM\IOSUBSYS\DRVWPPQT.VxD, thus disabling it.

Member Reports

Peter usually keeps backups simple to minimize the risk of adding confusion at a complex time. There were few problems he that had run into with Conners. He did not like the four-page, very poor, printed manual; he prefers to read the documentation before installing software. Although there is a lot of on-line stuff, this is not available before installation. Printing the Acrobat format manual hung a corporate printer so he never got the hard copy.

The simplest way to use the Conners backup product is by using the one-button backup option that basically backs up your whole drive by doing lots of things for you by default. Peter had only two partitions (one per drive) on the system he was backing up. That worked fairly well. Peter did mostly backups and few restores. His experience with partial restores was that they worked fairly well, including the registry. He feels that the user interface is fairly clean, it worked without consulting the manual.

Peter did notice that, on trying to overflow a 1.3 G native capacity tape (as part of testing what would happen when a second tape is needed), everything did get onto one tape because one-touch backup switched to compression mode without notifying him, and compressed into about 860 MB.

By Ken Langlais

When testing both these backups, Ken had 2 tape drives. One was an IOMEGA 800 and the other was an IOMEGA 3200. On the 800 Ken used a small-capacity QIC 80 tape. That made the Conners utility ask for many tapes and worked fine. He was used to Arcada software since that is the bundled software that came with both these drives, so the interface was familiar and it worked fairly well.

As for compatibility with previous versions, Ken found that in using a QIC 80 tape, the program gave him all the directories but did not give him any files within the directories. In using the 3200 TR3 tapes, it got the files within those directories just fine. He had no idea why the program did not like the QIC 80 tapes. After doing a backup, the reports told him that compressed size was greater than backup size, to him a minor flaw since it was only in report and the backup/restore worked.

By Len Segal

Conners Software's user interface is simple, looks familiar, so no manual is needed. He used it with a Jaz drive so that he could use DIR on the drive to show an index file and the compressed file containing his backup. He did not fill the disk, his backups totaled 600 to 700 MB. Len did run the disaster recovery part-way to test it, but could not afford to trash the system to do a total restore.

Len was basically satisfied with the software and was able to back up across a network. On the whole, Conners was a better product than some of the other stuff we've tested.

Steve asked if anyone has actually done a successful disaster recovery using Conners. Mark Bibace had tried unsuccessfully, but not in a clean way since he tried to restore a backup on from a PCI bus machine to a VL bus machine. Len commented that when you have significant hardware differences like that you can't rely on it booting up, except perhaps in safe mode.

By Steve Allen

One of his experiences was a backup (with verify), where he checked the report and everything looked OK. Installing a new operating system on the machine lost some files, which he expected to restore from that tape. He got the error message that the tape was blank even though he had not erased or done anything else with it. It was no real problem, as he had several generations of backup, but clearly an area for concern. End result: he now tries to protect himself by not just reading the report, but by also taking a "device view," which actually reads from the tape.

Pat Ryan lost his catalogs some way or another. No one testing Conners was able to convert their earlier catalogs, contrary to Conners's claim. E-mail and posting a message to Conners about how to use their catalog conversion program got no replies from them.

Probably best buy on the block, but Steve wishes it were a little better. One small wish that backup programs would include the on-tape identity (such as Tape 17) for the medium or media on which the files in that report were placed.