East-Tec Backup is software to protect valuable data against accidental loss, what is especially important in our digital age both for businesses and home users.

Businesses neglecting regular backups risk losing hours of work and important data. Though, it's a delusion to think that backup process is a solely business concern: home users in a split second may lose photo memories, favorite music, precious family movies, the list goes on.

East-Tech Backup offers the options attractive to home user. With East-Tech Backup saving seems to be easy to set up and schedule. Backups can happen automatically, without users' constant attention. East-Tech Backup has a user-friendly interface and is really easy to use. These are the program's obvious advantages. Let us look at the way it performs...

Interface and Options description:

The start window of the program looks like below. You can choose a task to perform: to create a new backup task, to manage previously created backup tasks, to restore files from previous backups.

The Wizard guides users through the process of setting a new backup task: choosing source, determining destination, options and scheduler. East-Tec Backup saves folders and files, Windows registry, messages from your local email (Outlook Express, MS Outlook, Opera, Eudora and Mozilla Thunderbird), as well as some MS setting, desktop links, etc.

Users can create lists of filename masks and use them to include or exclude specific file in a backup task.

The program offers all possible types of destination to keep backup files: removable devices, LAN folders, FTP server, CD/DVD, not mentioning local folders.

Backups can be on-demand or scheduled. The access to the Scheduler is available from the Wizard, what is convenient and makes a task creation complete. The Scheduler is easy to set and satisfies the needs of a home user. One peculiarity: automatic backups can be conducted just once a day, at the set time. Such Scheduler distracts from the use of East-Tec Backup for business purposes.

Backups with East-Tec can be incremental and differential. Habitual full backup is changed for stack backup. Backups may be compressed or saved without compression. The latter means that files will be backed up in native Windows format. The user can also set whether or not and how to encrypt backups.

There is an option to notify users on errors, warnings and summary by different mean, but East-Tec doesn't provide the option of verification on the backup completion.

The window to manage previously created tasks is easy to work with too. From the window we can edit, delete, import a backup, as well as start and stop a backup process.

Performance tests:

Backups and restoring single files goes quickly and flawlessly. Though, some of backup processes (small volume of data without compression both to CD and flash memory) neither completed nor resulted in the error messages. I would not call such performance stable.

To check how the program works under stress, I set a task of saving 20 Gb of a local disc content to be saved to a CD. This made East-Tec Backup engross to thoughts. Having consulted technical support I found out that the program cannot create an archive larger than 4 GB. Such restrictions seem to be usual, but the absence of warning messages is misleading. The Wizard doesn't provide an option of automatic media rotation. And the backup processes to test whether East-Tech will allow users to extract individual files from multi-volume CD backup set failed.

Being shareware soft, East-Tec Backup provides an opportunity to try before buy. Users are granted a license to evaluate East-Tec Backup for 15 days.

Summing up the program's pros and cons, I can say that East-Tec Backup is really easy to use and it suites purposes of home user alright, but the stability of performance does need improving.

East-Tec Backup 2008 keywords: backup, back up, computer, laptop, hard drive, dvd, files, emails, e-mails, outlook, registry, restore, encrypt, aes, compress, zip, archive, ftp, network, desktop