Backup software review: The Top 10 worst backup software programs

This is my top 10 of worst backup software programs out there, the first being the worst:

1. Acronis: Expensive, and damn slow. I backed up all my stuff, it took 14 hours!!! Then I thought next time I'll do a incremental backup; then it took just the same time.
Then I used a different drive. It ran for 13 hours then stopped telling me the drive is full. When I checked the drive was indeed full, the program gave me three options: OK, cancel and retry. Well OK doesn't help and retry is not much use because after 13 hours it figured that my backup won't fit on the drive. so i said cancel. Then guess what happened: it deleted the backup file. Why these morons delete the backup file is a mistery. The PC runs for 13 hours, only short of a couple of files to finish. My entire day wasted. at least it could have kept whatever it had backed up at that point.

Acronis part 2: two of my hard drives died while running acronis backup! Picture that: you run a backup and the backup causes your drives to die. OK, maybe their time had come. But why this happened twice is still a good question....

2. BounceBack: I didn't find incremental/differential backup capability and no compression. what is the point: i can just copy the files myself if need be. plus way too expensive at $69 considering its inferior features. i heard from others as well that it's painfully slow....

3. Easeus Todo Backup. Yeah I know it's free. But how many things that are good are free these days? Especially when talking about software. Free = crap! In this case this applies absolutely. The feature set is so limited, I might as well use Windows Backup. There's no incremental backup, no schedule, nothing. Save your time people!

4. Macrium Reflect: they try to be the rival of acronis. But in my opinion both suck. Imaging is a thing of the past. Images are pretty much useless. Why? Check this out. Say you make an image just in case your computer blows up. Well try to install that image on another computer. All the software, including Windows and Office, these days has online activation that's tied to your hardware. Unless you are only your hard drive, the image won't boot or you will need to re-activate all your software. Good luck. Sure, you might be lucky and it might work if your NEW PC is very similar to your old one. But that's almost impossible.
Harddrive images are very limited in their use. It's better to save your files separately and reinstall Windows.
Besides, it's always good to reinstall Windows on a clean harddrive every now and then. The damn thing gets so slow otherwise. Remember how fast your PC was when you first bought it? No coincidence. And the last thing you want is to buy a new computer and then slow it down with that old image which is full of crap....

5. Paragon Backup & Recovery. OK check this out: $69 bucks! On Version 10 (!) they tout they finally have a scheduler. Oh my God, welcome to the year 2010! New: backup to FTP. Come on guys, where were you in the last decade!

6. Second Backup. "The best file backup software." ;-) Now these guys still live in the 1990s, look at their website. You can backup files and see which files have been modified. Wow! Who's gonna buy this may I ask. use xcopy! and the Windows task scheduler is much more sophisticated, so why bother. Free or not, don't waste your efforts

7. TrueSafe: I couldn't find incremental backup functionality. Well I don't think I want to copy my entire 500GB of databases each time the backup runs....

8. SyncBack: Talk about complicated user interface. You need a dictionary and an hour to figure out what is going on. They tried to split it into novice/advanced mode but that only hides most of the features and then you wonder whether the program actually has the feature or not. It's too limited (the free edition) and the paid edition is complex. Plus there is no incremental backup. If only one row changes in my database, the entire 100GB file is copied. not cool at all....

9. Nero BackItUp & Burn: well what can I say. They are fixated on CD/DVD backups. I guess they haven't realized that CDs and DVDs are waaay to small for the pro user. And for a novice it's pretty useless. you can burn CDs with CDBurnerXP for free. So why bother!?

10. APBackUp: To them, incremental backup means to copy changed files. Ah, hello: xcopy can do that too, so why pay $40? OK, it can send it FTP. So can Filezilla...for free!