.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT SHOOTOUT
.TITLE Backup Battle Royale
.AUTHOR James Booth
.SUMMARY Whether you’re responsible for a multi-national corporate enterprise, or just a home handheld user, the security of your data depends on reliable backups. In this Battle Royale of the Backups, Senior Technical Editor James Booth examines three backup utilities for Palm OS handheld devices, comparing features, price, reliability, and ease of use. Which one will be the ultimate champion? Read on to find out.
.OTHER
Whether you’re responsible for a multi-national corporate enterprise, or just a home handheld user, the security of your data depends on reliable backups. In this Battle Royale of the Backups, I’ll examine three backup utilities for Palm OS handheld devices, comparing features, price, reliability, and ease of use. Which one will be the ultimate champion? Read on to find out.
I’ll covering be BackupMan, BackupBuddy, and Fly Backup, all for the Palm platform. I also contacted Pitech, makers of PiBackup II, but they didn’t respond. Whether as a result of junk mail filters, personnel changes, or just plain lack of interest I don’t know. Fortunately, there are three other products that’ll definitely watch your back. So instead of this being a four-way battle, our product shootout will be cutthroat three-way all-out challenge.
.H1 BackupMan v1.51
BackupMan, by Bits & Bolts software, is a handheld-only backup application for the Palm OS. I say handheld-only because one of the pieces I’m covering does have a desktop counterpart, but the original intended focus of this piece is "portable" backup solutions.
BackupMan, in Figure A, has been designed for OS 5 devices, but will support OS 3.5 and up that have a VFS enabled expansion slot.
.FIGPAIR A BackupMan from Bits & Bolts is our first contender in the Backup Battle Royale.
It provides the option to schedule fully automated backups, whether the device is on or not. The automation can be set for daily backups triggered to a specific time, hourly backups, or even to backup every time you Hotsync, as you see in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B BackupMan’s scheduling options will suit all your needs, whatever they may be.
.BREAK_EMAIL Watch these three programs battle it out. Who deserves your cash money, Honey? Read on.
You can put multiple backups on a single expansion card as well, provided the card has the space of course. In addition, as Figure C shows, when it comes to restores, you can select individual files, or the kit and caboodle.
.FIGPAIR C With BackupMan, you can restore all at once, or select single files.
BackupMan retails for an even $10 through either Handango or PalmGear. If you’d like to check out BackupMan before you buy, the demo is a fully functioning version, but is limited to 7 days of use.
Registration brings tech support, maintenance, and minor release updates, in addition to update notification. On the site, the policy states that a major version upgrade is only free within sixty days of purchase of a previous version.
Mike Waldron of Bits & Bolts has told me that to date, they haven’t charged for any major upgrades. They just prefer to keep the option open in the event that a major upgrade results in a complete reworking of the software, with vastly different features. In essence, what amounts to a completely new application.
.H1 FlyBackUp v1.7
Next on the fight card we have FlyBackUp from the curiously named FlyZip. Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Like BackupMan, FlyBackUp is a handheld-only backup app.
FlyBackUp, in Figure D, requires Palm OS 4.0 or higher, and has native support for OS 5.
.FIGPAIR D FlyBackUp from FlyZip is competitor number two in our shootout.
It features support for devices with multiple cards, i.e. Tapwave Zodiac. It allows you to choose which of those expansion cards to use for your backups, and what percentage of the card to dedicate for backup use. You can even specify different cards for manual and automated backups. Figure E shows the many backup options available with FlyBackUp.
.FIGPAIR E You can see here all the backup options available with FlyBackUp.
Speaking of automated. FlyBackUp offers fully automated, set and forget, scheduled backups. The backups can be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, or on user specified time intervals. FlyBackUp also features full encryption with password protection. It retails for $9.95 through the FlyZip site.
.H1 BackupBuddy
BackupBuddy from Blue Nomad, our final contender, comes in two flavors, BackupBuddy, the desktop application for backing up your handheld, shown in Figure F, and BackupBuddyVFS, the handheld backup application. Both are standalone applications and not dependent on one another.
.FIGPAIR F BackupBuddy backs up your handheld to your desktop PC.
The BackupBuddy desktop application is currently PC specific and operates through a Hotsync conduit. It defaults as the last conduit so that if any changes are made to your device during a sync, they’ll be recorded in the backup.
The purpose of this piece really isn’t to do a full-blown review of the desktop application, so I’m only going to touch on it lightly, then move on to BackupBuddyVFS.
The BackupBuddy desktop application lets you do multiple backups of the data and applications on your Palm handheld. You can then go back and restore single applications or data, or do an all or nothing. It also keeps multiple backups on record, so that if do another backup after installing a system killer, you can do a restore from a prior backup.
BackupBuddy also comes with a free copy of TimeSync and BackupBuddyVFS Personal. TimeSync will keep the system time of your handheld synched to the system time of your desktop. BackupBuddyVFS Personal is a lite version of BackupBuddyVFS Professional. It allows you to do an all or nothing backup of your handheld, no individual file selection. The BackupBuddy desktop application retails for $29.95.
.H1 BackupBuddyVFS Professional
BackupBuddyVFS Professional, in Figure G, is the handheld-only version of BackupBuddy, and is a completely new version, just recently released.
.FIGPAIR G BackupBuddyVFS is our final competitor in the backup application shootout.
I had the pleasure of actually taking part in the beta testing of this version, so I was able to see the product progress through all stages. This was my first experience at beta testing, so it was kind of exciting for me.
BackupBuddyVFS Professional, like the other competitors, features automated backups that can be set to the users needs. It also has password protection, selective or complete file backup and restore, shown in Figure H, checkpoint restores, archiving, and multiple card operation.
.FIGPAIR H Individual file backup and restore is one advantage that BackupBuddyVFS Professional has over the others.
As you can see in Figure I, unlike the other two applications tested, it has advanced file compression and the ability to store backups from different Hotsync IDs on the same card.
.FIGPAIR I BackupBuddyVFS Professional features advanced compression so your backups take up less space.
BackupBuddyVFS Professional retails for $19.95, the Personal version goes for $9.95, and a combo pack of the desktop BackupBuddy and BackupBuddyVFS Professional is $34.95.
.H1 Let’s get it on!
So which of our solutions is the winner? Much like in my senior year government class, the answer is, "It depends." It depends on what’s most important to you. Price? Speed? Space? See, it depends.
Any one of these applications does an excellent job of backing up and restoring the data on your handheld. If your biggest factor is cost, you couldn’t go wrong with BackupMan at $10, FlyBackUp at $9.95, or BackupBuddyVFS Personal.
I mean, come one, we’re only talking about a difference of a nickel here. These all have basically identical features, and functioned identically as well. So it’s really your choice. Although at testing time, BackupMan is the only one of these three that has individual file restore.
As of the writing of this piece, both FlyBackUp and BackupMan have upgrades planned in the near future. Bits & Bolts will be adding encryption, more scheduling options, an improved user interface, and individual file backup in addition to the indivual file restore it already has. Improved compression is a consideration, but not set in stone at the time of this writing.
FlyZip has plans to include individual file selection to FlyBackUp. They tell me this was the feature most requested by their users.
If speed is your prime concern, then BackupBuddyVFS has the other two beat. BackupBuddyVFS uses an incremental backup, so only the information that has changed is written on subsequent backups.
With all of the applications the initial backup took a couple of minutes. Subsequent backups with BackupBuddyVFS took seconds, where as with the other two, they took the same amount of time as the original backup. Whether you were to get the Professional or Personal version, results would be identical.
In my mind, the best overall value would be BackupBuddyVFS Professional. It may cost more, but it offers features the other two don’t have at this time. Am I biased because I participated in the beta? Not at all. I’m a fair reviewer and point out faults as well as features regardless.
The added compression feature in BackupBuddyVFS Professional is a benefit, and saved about 11MB on my backup. The ability to put backups from more than one device on a single card is a definite plus as well. It lets users of multiple devices in the same household save money on expansion cards by storing the backups for all devices on the same card.
By far, the best value overall is the combination pack of BackupBuddy and BackupBuddyVFS Professional for $34.95. It gives you a complete backup solution, both mobile and fixed, with individual file backup and restore, compression, security, scheduling, and multiple users on a single card.
.H1 The rankings
Now it’s time to give each of our participants their rankings. So how do they pan out?
BackupMan from Bits & Bolts, I give a 3 out of 5. It’s a good solid backup application as it is, but the planned improvements will make it even better. I would recommend they look further into the compression angle, as one of their major competitors already has.
.RATING 3
FlyBackUp from FlyZip also gets a 3 out of 5. Again, it’s an excellent backup solution as it is, but planned upgrades will make it better. I would also suggest FlyBackUp investigate stronger compression.
.RATING 3
BackupBuddyVFS I have to give a 4 out of 5. It clearly offers features and benefits the other two don’t, which make up for it’s higher price.
.RATING 4
So you see, which is the best for you depends greatly on what attributes are most important to you.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
For more information on BackupMan, visit http://www.bitsnbolts.com/backupman.html.
For more information on FlyBackUp, visit http://www.fly-zip.com/flypage.php?code=00126.
For more information on BackupBuddy and BackupBuddyVFS, visit http://www.bluenomad.com.
For more information on the Tapwave Zodiac, visit http://www.tapwave.com.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
