Review: Autosave Essentials 3.0 by Avanquest Software

In a series of articles looking at backup solutions for Windows Vista, we've examined using the Vista Backup Center and setting up automatic daily incremental backups in Task Manager for the Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate versions of Vista.

We found that the Home versions of Vista are far less capable, being able to only backup specific types of data and not able to make a full, recoverable copy of the hard drive. Then we addressed the problem of creating a bootable disk in Vista in order to be able to start a recovery environment in the event of complete hard drive failure. This boot disk allows us to recover the entire hard drive from an external backup.

Then we looked at a more powerful solution - Acronis True Image Home 2009 - that not only can make full-disk backups, but also daily incremental backups in all versions of Vista. We found that through the addition of helpful wizards, Acronis is easier to use than ever. We were also happy to find that it had not lost any of its ability to clone a laptop hard drive to a bigger drive, which is what True Image is mostly known for. Now it's a powerful multi-purpose backup tool, as well.

However, Acronis True Image may be overkill for some users. For those seeking an easy to master, unobtrusive, "set it and forget it" backup, without the need to image the hard drive, we'll now look at backing up not the entire hard drive, but just our essential data. Even better, this is a solution that will work in the Home and Basic versions of Vista as well as in Windows XP.

If installing the trial version, you won't have a serial number to enter, but look closely at the dialog. Click the "Trial" button on the right to continue.

Compare that to the program running on a 1680 x 1150 display. No scroll-bars!

Select the Backp Target

The next step is to select the backup target. Here we selected a 160 GB USB external hard drive as the destination.

Backup to FTP

Alternatively, if you have access to an FTP location, you can use Autosave Essential's ability to place your backup files there - it acts as its own server.

 Other choices are to back up to a USB flash drive and a local drive such as a DVD burner.

Backup Schedule

The wizard then asks for your intended backup schedule. Choices are Continuously, Every Day, Every Week, Every Month, at startup of the PC, and Manually only. If you have a relatively recent PC and you're backing up to a large external target (not DVD or flash drive), it's OK to select "Continuously." Autosave Essentials runs quite handily and unobtrusively in the background.

Do you see the problem? It's pointing to the wrong drive now.

This particular pocket drive is a hybrid drive - it has a "CD Part" and a "Hard Drive Part." In the setup wizard, I selected the hard drive partition, but Autosave Essentials reverted to the non-writable CD Part. I've learned how to flash the hard drive's EPROM to format it as one big hard drive, but this was a bit of a surprise.

So why did we still give a very good rating? Because I think the problem arose from using the hybrid drive. These devices work by trickery, so I'm not surprised that Autosave Essentials got tricked.

Also, as shown in the middle image above, once the program was re-pointed to the hard disk part of the drive, it retained the settings and successfully completed the backup. It also remembered after a reboot and then next day, too.

So it gets high ratings for "set it and forget it" as well.

Overall, we'll rate Autosave Essentials highly and recommend it for those who do not need a whole disk backup program and who don't want to spend the time to learn a more powerful, more complicated backup solution.

Our criticisms were minor - the program did what we expected it to do, did it unobtrusively and quietly, and looked good while doing it.

It should live up to its billing as an easy to use and easy to set up application for those who aren't computer whizzes themselves. And, you know, we can all use a bit more "easy" in this world.

Additionally, with most laptops and PCs coming with recovery partitions that contain a copy of the operating system, full disk backups are not as necessary as they once were.

That's truth before commerce. Thank you for visiting the new Bright Hub and for reading this.

Autosave Essentials by Avanquest Software $39.99