When insuring businesses, insurance companies make certain that business databases are secure and being backed up. For some cases the requirement has become a standard. The Backup Premium program helps to preserve vital information, serves to automate the process of making backup copies and can be used both for business and home needs.

Backup Premium is developed so to make backup and restore processes plain and quick. Wizard leads through all the stages: What to backup, Where to backup, How to backup, Scheduled backup, Additional actions, and, finally, Run the backup.

Backup Premium features more or less standard for the class of programs set of features: various storage types, full and incremental backups, customizable schedule, Zip compression, Blowfish encryption, data integrity testing.

What to backup. Here we can add and remove files and folders; include and exclude files and subfolders, or set the task to work with files matching specified masks only.

Where to backup. All removable, flesh, network drives and devices, as well as remote FTP servers are supported. When saving on CD/RWs, mind that the option of automatic media rotation is not provided. Contrary to, for example, Handy Backup (one of the most popular programs of the class) Backup Premium doesn't automatically offer to split large files and prompt users to replace a disk.

How to backup. Users have to decide if backed up copies should be compressed and encrypted. Compression is carried out with the help of one-rate built in Zip archiver. Blowfish algorithm of encryption allows to set passwords up to 56 characters in length.

The program developers declare the possibility of full and incremental backups. It would be logical that the option should be provided in the How To Backup window. It is not. And the place where it is available hasn't been discovered yet. Probably, the option will be realized in some future versions.

Scheduled Backup. Obviously, the main advantage of such programs is the automatic, background, scheduled backup. Backup Premium can be set to run just once, or daily at specific time, or at specific time on specific days, etc.

What is not present and might be convenient is the option to run missed schedules, or run backups on the PC logon/logoff.

The program's main window consists of 3 parts:

1. Navigation View has an Explorer-like interface, presents all folders and files to be backed up, shows their states, dates when they were last modified, the time of last runs, and local sizes.
2. Summary Pad on the left contains Backup Summary (what, where, etc.) and Backup Status – state description.
3. Backup Log gives the information about errors, operations status and details.

The Backup Summary and Backup Log views can be minimized and restored, but, in general, the program's Toolbar and Views are not customizable. The level of operation details can be set from basic to full. Though, for home users the information may seem excessive: if Backup Status says a back up is finished with no errors, there's no reason to study the Backup Log.

An interesting feature, positioned as being especially useful for network administrators, is Email Notification. You can set it at the Additional Actions stage. Having specified email address, SMTP port, etc., upon every backup completion, you receive a report about the backup status, or, if set so, about error only. Quite convenient indeed.

Backup Premium allows to restore both complete backup sets and single files.

Command line interface is supported.

Pressing the Tool button of the program's main menu gives the options to save and load Backup Premium configuration and all backup set options. So, later we can load the saved backup sets, change their options and run backups.

The most obvious weakness of the program is a one-task approach. We are welcome to add files and folders to the existing backup set, but we can't create and simultaneously run several backup sessions with different settings. That is we can't simultaneously backup some files to flash drives scheduled every Monday and some files to CD scheduled every day.

Summing up, Backup Premium is a carefully developed, easy-to-use and user-friendly program. But considering the total package of options, it is obviously inferior to some popular analogues, Handy Backup by SoftLogica in particular.

Backup Premium keywords: backup, encryption, zip, compression, automatic backup, sftp backup, ssl backup