Active Backup Expert Standard Reviewer's Comments

If you're looking for inexpensive backup software with some basic capabilities, consider Active Backup Expert Professional by OrionSoftLab.

Feature Set:  

Active Backup Expert has a handy filter that makes selecting a specific file type simple. For example, you can select all your photos for backup with the filter. Also, you can import and export backup jobs over a remote online FTP location; this feature is unique to Active Backup Expert.

The backup screen displays all past backups to your hard drive and their exact locations—helpful if you store backups in more than one place.

It's easy to select between a full, incremental, or differential backup with this software, but Active Backup Expert can't make a complete hard drive image.

Unlike most backup software programs that provide a report when backup is complete, Active Backup Expert only allows you to save your own comments on each backup job. Active Backup Expert does keep a log of backup warnings and errors, but this is difficult to find.

Active Backup Expert cannot backup your registry, address book, Internet favorites or email. If you backup to disk, you must have your own burning software, and you cannot set up disk spanning. Also, Active Backup Expert can't create a restoration boot disk.

Ease of Use:  

Active Backup Expert's setup and installation were straightforward, but the program design was awkward. To make a backup you must follow seven steps; to restore you must click a dropdown menu then select the correct options.

We backed up a hard drive using Active Backup Expert and received an error—the file was over two gigabytes, the limit for the zip backup format. After spending time in the advanced section, we found out how to select a different backup format and successfully backed up the hard drive.

Backup/Restore:  

After some trial and error, we completed a successful backup and restore. We backed up a few files to a different hard drive then restored them to a new folder on the original hard drive, but then received this error message: The system could not find the file specified—Error Code 2. We didn't understand why we received the message because all files were restored properly.

Help/Documentation:  

Active Backup Expert offers several forms of help: a small index with a search tool and term glossary for the main help file, a Help On window that gives you relevant help during specific tasks and, within the help, a tutorial that shows how to complete each program function.

Another section called Using the Program teaches backup strategies like: what to backup, how often to backup, where to store backups and more.

Active Backup Expert also offers email support and automatic updates.

Summary:  

Active Backup Expert by OrionSoftLab works well for those with patience to learn the program.