Guidelines for Evaluation of Software

If you ever tried to purchase backup software you must have realized that there are numerous of them and each one of them has its own specialty. In such a scenario, how do you evaluate the backup software?
 
When you evaluate which backup software to use, you need to keep in mind the following guidelines:

  1. Ease of Use: There are a large number of software solutions which are not very user friendly. Hence, you need to look at the general interface of the program, and their utility. Consider the design and feel and how easy it is for you to use it.  You also need to look at the documentation included and the amount and degree of relevant help available to the user, for each menu and function.
  2. Features: You should also concentrate on the additional utilities and tools that were included with the software, adding functionality. For example there are some backup software titles with an in-built scheduler. So, you can create a schedule for backup and the rest of the work is done by the software itself. Other important features to look for are:

    1. Incremental backup: Ability to identify and backup only those files which have changed since the last backup.
    2. Backup Wizards: Step by step questions and answers which make it easy to backup data. 
    3. Ability to create bootable disk: Sometimes, the entire computer must be restored and a bootable disk becomes a necessity. 
    4. Backup to LAN: For office PC’s, it great if you can back up data over LAN so that the backup disk can be shared by other computers.
    5. Online backup: Similar to LAN Backup, if there is a facility to backup to internet, it’s very useful.
    6. CD Backup: Check if directly burning of CD is supported or not. 
    7. Encrypted backup: Ability to provide a password to the backup file so that it is safe from unauthorized users. 
    8. Scheduled backup: Allows you to setup a schedule when to backup data.
  3. File Read Speed: This is an important aspect of the software that you want to buy. File-read speed refers to the speed at which the backup and restore software is able to scan the hard disk to back up a file or directory. Some utilities are very fast, others are dramatically slow.
  4. Reliability: There must be a good combination of reliability and speed. Reliability means that the backup files should never be corrupted and restoration of data should be possible. Speed means that data backup should not take much time. 
  5. System Resource Use: Although the newer machines available today have high processing speeds and RAM has become so cheap that systems with 512 MB or 1 GB of RAM are common; the less the resources consumed by the backup software, the better it is.