Those Left Behind

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday October 14, 2006

Nick Galvin

Some back-up devices claim to copy everything, but your email might be forgotten, writes Nick Galvin.

There are many aspects of computers that are exciting, fun ... sexy, even. Back-up software is not one of them. However, backing up (periodically saving files onto a separate hard drive or disk) becomes of critical interest if you ever have the misfortune to lose data.

It becomes doubly serious if you discover all the data you thought was safely duplicated to another disk is not there. That's what Robert Gareb found. He runs a computer services company called Uniwell (uniwell.com.au) and is a reseller for Maxtor, which markets external drives and back-up software.

Gareb has recommended the Maxtor OneTouch III to plenty of clients as the ideal way to ensure their files are still there in the event of a crash. "Back up your entire hard drive with a push of a button" is the main selling point of the OneTouch III. But, to his dismay, Gareb has discovered the OneTouch software does not back-up the "entire hard drive".

"If it says 'Back up your entire hard drive' on the box you would expect it to back up your entire hard drive," he says, not unreasonably. "But what it says on the box is not what it does."

The problem is that the software bundled with the OneTouch III - Maxtor Backup - doesn't back up application files and, even more worryingly, does not appear to capture the data files created by the email programs Outlook and Outlook Express. In other words, Gareb said, it won't back up your email.

This only became apparent to Gareb when a client had a hard-disk failure and he tried to restore the data, but found these vital files were missing from the backed-up version.

"Back-up software are like insurance policies and you only find out how good your policy is when you go to make a claim," Gareb says. "There are a lot of people out there who are relying on this product but who will only find out when they have a hard-drive crash."

Gareb took his problem to Maxtor support and received this response: "The Outlook and Outlook Express files are not supported files ... This is because they are Microsoft encrypted files and are not supported by our software back-up software. These files would have to be backed up by another means or a different backup software ..."

These limitations are also detailed on the company's website - buried deep within their FAQs.

We contacted Maxtor to clarify what it understood "Back up your entire hard drive" to mean. The initial response was that, while it is not referred to anywhere in the manuals for the product, the software will back up Outlook files if they are moved from the default location so Maxtor Backup can locate them.

A spokesman added that most people are "quite happy" to do this - presuming, of course, they can work out how to do it without any documentation.

And on the fact it will not back up applications, he had this to say: "This is a back-up solution, not disaster recovery or system recovery solution, so there is no need to back up system files."

Still not satisfied, we asked for more detail, which had to come from a technician in the United States. This time we got more information on where to find the files and how settings within the program should be changed. Maxtor also said it would update its website accordingly.

We passed it on to Gareb and this time, after a fair bit of fiddling about, it worked.

However, the question remains: how many people out there have been relying on the product to back up their entire hard drive as promised but are going to be badly let down if they have a hard-disk crash?

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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