CyberLink PowerBackup 2.5 Review

Introduction

CyberLink PowerBackup 2.5 is software that allows you to save and restore your computer files.

Imagine your computer is the victim of disk failure, theft, or a virus – do you have digital images, videos, work documents, and so on that you cannot afford to lose? If so then backing up your files is an essential safety precaution. So regardless of your decision to use software like PowerBackup, make sure you invest in backing up your important files.

Ease of Use

The interface of CyberLink PowerBackup feels cumbersome and overwhelmed with tasks that are technical. PowerBackup fails to provide a convenient wizard that smoothly steps you through each aspect of backing up your data.

The backup and restore process is a four step process, but it can be difficult to progress to the next step because there is no “Next” style button – instead your left fumbling around until you discover you have to click the number 2 to continue.

Restoring files in PowerBackup is also made harder because you have to browse for the location of the backup archives.

The help button should be more noticeable, and the grey and reddish colour scheme is tedious. Overall, CyberLink PowerBackup has a long way to go before it becomes a user friendly program.

Features

CyberLink PowerBackup is intended for file backup only - if you need to create a complete drive image or bootable backup disk you’re out of luck. Furthermore, there are no options to backup to an online location.

3 Backup Modes: Incremental, Differential and Full.

Backup Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook Application data: in laymen terms you can backup your browser favourites, and emails.

Compression: options available to use the smallest amount of space possible by compressing the backup data.

Password Protection: prevent unauthorised access to your backup archives.

Scheduled Backups: once, daily, weekly, and monthly.

Split Volume Backups: supports spreading a large backup archive across two or more destinations.

Storage Medium Supported: CD-R/-RW, DVD-R/-RW, DVD+R/+RW, hard disk, USB, Jazz, ZIP, MO drives

Performance

CyberLink PowerBackup was effortless to test because it is a skinny backup program in terms of features. PowerBackup showed itself to be very slow as it took 54 minutes and 53 seconds to back up 21 Gigabyte of data to an external hard drive. The restoration of that same data took only 17 minutes and 31 seconds.

In a nutshell, CyberLink PowerBackup 2.5 is a slow file backup application and that is all.

Help & Support

Forums

The CyberLink Forum at http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/forums/list/ENU.page is very active as it has 96,915 messages and 153,120 users. However, the forum is predominately about other CyberLink products, and PowerBackup does not even have its own section.

User Guide

The user guide contains helpful information on using CyberLink PowerBackup, and can be found at either https://membership.cyberlink.com/downloads/support/powerbackup/userguide_en_AU.html - or when you’re in CyberLink PowerBackup push F1 or click “Help” and then “Help Topics”.

Phone

The CyberLink telephone support is limited as it’s apparently for North American users only, and costs to use.

More information on CyberLink phone support can be found at https://membership.cyberlink.com/prog/support/cs/voice-support.jsp

Email
http://www.cyberlink.com/prog/support/cs/contact-support.jsp
CyberLink email support does a good job as I emailed them a question about PowerBackup, and they responded the next day with an answer.

Conclusion

CyberLink PowerBackup 2.5 is an inadequate data backup program.  It takes way too long to backup data. It only supports file backups. It has few features. It is difficult to use. Phone support is only available in North America and is expensive. I encourage you to view my list of data backup software to find a better alternative.

Cost/Value:		2/5
Overall rating:		2.2

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CyberLink PowerBackup 2.5






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