July 13, 2006
Product Review: VCOM Autosave 2
Richard Kuper
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
Backing up is something everyone should do. Maybe a file will get corrupted or you will accidentally overwrite a file and want to go back to a previous version. Who knows?
VCOM Autosave 2 is included in a whole suite of products from VCOM (http://www.v-com.com) called SystemSuite Professional 6 ($59.95). It is also sold as a stand-alone product for $49.99.
So how does VCOM Autosave 2 fare as a backup and recovery tool?
From the VCOM product website:
"VCOM’s AutoSave gives you a unique, real-time, automatic backup security solution that you simply set up once and forget!"
Well, that part is certainly true. I set it up and then it did its thing.
From the VCOM product website:
"AutoSave ... continuously watches files you’re working on and automatically saves a backup whenever you create or save a file. It can even save multiple 'history' versions of your changed files. Best of all, it does this in the background while you work, without interruption!"
Unfortunately, every time it decided to back stuff up, it ate resources on the pc and sometimes brought the pc to a crawl.
From the VCOM product website:
"[T]he Restore wizard walks users through disaster recovery quickly and easily."
Well, I'm not quite sure what they mean by "quickly and easily." I finally had to try to get a backup version of a file because I had inadvertently written over it and for some reason the software (MS Word) had not made it's own backup copy of this particular file (I have the feature turned on in MS Word). So I started up VCOM's Autosave to try to get the previously backed up copy. This turned out to be an extremely difficult and painful process. I will summarize to spare you the same pain. It took literally hours to drill down to the folder the file was in, and I was unable to do any other work on the pc, as it took up all of the pc's resources. When I finally got to the folder, there was no way to simply select the one file I wanted to copy. The only option was to restore the whole folder. So I first needed to create a new folder to restore to so that no files would be overwritten. And since the files were stored in a proprietary format, I could not simply copy and paste the file I wanted.
In the end I was indeed able to get the file I wanted (and many other files I didn't want), but the time and pain were just too much.
For those wondering, the pc this occurred on has a 2.8G Pentium 4 chip, 160G hard drive, 512K memory, Windows XP Home.
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R.L. Kuper, Inc. - Management Consulting
The Kuper Report
http://TheKuperReport.com
Backing up is something everyone should do. Maybe a file will get corrupted or you will accidentally overwrite a file and want to go back to a previous version. Who knows?
VCOM Autosave 2 is included in a whole suite of products from VCOM (http://www.v-com.com) called SystemSuite Professional 6 ($59.95). It is also sold as a stand-alone product for $49.99.
So how does VCOM Autosave 2 fare as a backup and recovery tool?
From the VCOM product website:
"VCOM’s AutoSave gives you a unique, real-time, automatic backup security solution that you simply set up once and forget!"
Well, that part is certainly true. I set it up and then it did its thing.
From the VCOM product website:
"AutoSave ... continuously watches files you’re working on and automatically saves a backup whenever you create or save a file. It can even save multiple 'history' versions of your changed files. Best of all, it does this in the background while you work, without interruption!"
Unfortunately, every time it decided to back stuff up, it ate resources on the pc and sometimes brought the pc to a crawl.
From the VCOM product website:
"[T]he Restore wizard walks users through disaster recovery quickly and easily."
Well, I'm not quite sure what they mean by "quickly and easily." I finally had to try to get a backup version of a file because I had inadvertently written over it and for some reason the software (MS Word) had not made it's own backup copy of this particular file (I have the feature turned on in MS Word). So I started up VCOM's Autosave to try to get the previously backed up copy. This turned out to be an extremely difficult and painful process. I will summarize to spare you the same pain. It took literally hours to drill down to the folder the file was in, and I was unable to do any other work on the pc, as it took up all of the pc's resources. When I finally got to the folder, there was no way to simply select the one file I wanted to copy. The only option was to restore the whole folder. So I first needed to create a new folder to restore to so that no files would be overwritten. And since the files were stored in a proprietary format, I could not simply copy and paste the file I wanted.
In the end I was indeed able to get the file I wanted (and many other files I didn't want), but the time and pain were just too much.
For those wondering, the pc this occurred on has a 2.8G Pentium 4 chip, 160G hard drive, 512K memory, Windows XP Home.
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