|
||
 |
|
 |
|
REVIEW - NOVASTOR NOVA BACKUP
by Earl
Dallas: 
earl@dallas.freeserve.co.uk
Most Windows users are content to use the backup software provided with Windows, or any software that comes free with their chosen backup device. It may be worth your while obtaining a full version of backup software if your current software is slow or does not support compression or virus checking. If you need to backup to a tape system such as DAT the standard Windows software will not be suitable.
Novastor Nova Backup runs under Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and NT as well as OS/2. The software is available from PC world and many mail order companies and costs around £50. The system requirements are an IBM compatible PC 486DX or higher, 8Mb RAM (16Mb for NT), 10Mb free hard disk space and DOS 5 or higher. Nova Backup consists of two programs Nova Disk for disk backups and Nova Back for tape backups. The tape program supports both QIC and SCSI tape drives including DAT. A full list of supported drives is available on the Novastor Internet page (see www.novastor.com). The disk program supports floppy drives, flopticals, magneto optical, zip, Syquest and Iomega removable disks.
The main features of the software are accessed through large buttons arranged along the top of the program window. The main functions are:
Select files - Select files to be backed up and backup options.
Procedure - Retrieve previously saved file list and backup options.
Restore - Restore from backup medium.
Options - Set options for backup and restore, encryption, virus checking and setup editor (Notepad is the default editor).
Scheduler - Set up time of scheduled backup and select backup to be processed.
View logs - View logs of previous Nova disk actions.
Anti virus - Set virus checking options.
Encryption - Enable / disable encryption and set encryption key.
Help - Online help.
The above features are self explanatory. Other options, only available from the menu bar, are "Verify a backup" and "summarize a backup" which searches a previously made backup and generates a report of its contents.
A separate program "Nova Boot", which is provided with both packages, creates a backup that can be used to restore a hard disk. You would normally use such a backup after a hard disk failure or Windows corruption. Note that to use this feature to restore a Windows system you will need to have a bootable floppy, which Nova Boot will create, and the appropriate drivers to use your backup medium from DOS. The backup created by Nova Boot is not the same as those created with the Nova Disk program and the files created by one program should not be accessed by the other. Nova Back has similar features as Nova Disk as well as functions dedicated to tape drives such as: format tape, retention tape, erase tape and Dr. Tape which is a tape drive configuration utility.
As a guide to the performance that you can expect from the software I carried out the following test. I created a directory of word processor and JPEG graphical image files. The directory contained 545 files, which when combined had a file size of 102Mb. I saved this file using MSBackup and Nova Disk to an LS120 drive on an AMD233MHz PC with 40Mb of RAM. Both compressed and non compressed backups were carried out with the following results. Both MSBackup and Nova Disk backups occupied the same amount of disk space, 103 Mb non compressed and 39.5Mb compressed. Only the amount of time required to create the backup varied. MSBackup required 57 minutes to save the non compressed backup and 23 minutes to save the compressed backup. Nova Disk required only 12 minutes to save the non compressed backup and 5 minutes to save the compressed backup.
As you can see the main advantage of the Novastor software over MSBackup is wide tape drive support and a reduction in backup time to 1/5 of the time required by MSBackup. Other features include scheduled, virus checked and encrypted backups. If you are interested you don't have to take my word for the software's performance you can download an evaluation copy of the software from the Novastor web site and try it for yourself.
