The 2011 Toyota Prius is an exceptionally efficient car at a relatively low price for people who care more about conservation than the act of driving. Given its success, the formula seems to have. GFI Back up provides an excellent solution for securing your Hard Disk data storage. GFI Backup enables you to back up your important documents, photos, music, e-mails and program settings using a simple but smart wizard driven interface to most popular storage device. It also restores data in minutes using the common ZIP format. GFI Backup Home Edition. GFI Backup Home Edition offers a good set of features and functionality, and overall is a good choice for both beginners and advanced users. Although the backup features are quite reliable, it has several serious bugs with its scheduler. If you require a backup software with a reliable scheduler, you may want to look.
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Disclosure – The author has been compensated to provide an honest opinion of the product in this review. You can read our full disclosure statement here.
GFI has recently released two backup products, a free one for home users and a paid product for business users. I downloaded and tested the Business Edition to see if it was as easy to install and use as they claim.
Installation
Installing GFI Business Edition was quite simple following an easy to understand setup wizard. I installed it on a virtualized server running Windows Server 2008 with Service Pack 2.
There are no complex set up requirements such as SQL databases to worry about. GFI Backup installs its own web server and listens on a custom port (you can change the port if you wish) for administration access, as well as ports for communications with remote agents.
Though I found this very easy to install I had to manually open firewall ports on the Windows Server 2008 server to allow remote administration access as they weren’t opened automatically by the installer as with some other applications.
Backing Up Files
Remote agent deployment can be performed using Group Policy or by manually initiating it from the remote server. There is no push option available to roll out remote agents.
The GPO deployment option would be suitable for deploying the remote agents to desktops and laptops but not as convenient for servers. For servers the manual agent deployment is best, though the most effort. If you want to save time you could script the server agent install but whether that saves you time will depend on the size of your environment and your scripting skills.
Backup types are file/folder, or SQL only. There is no option to backup Exchange Server or Active Directory. This would seem to be the greatest weakness of GFI Backup however for small businesses that run in a workgroup configuration without Active Directory, or have their email service hosted in the cloud these aren’t going to present a problem.
The default backup inclusions/exclusions that define a broad range of common productivity file types are useful especially when creating backup jobs for PCs.
The backup destination is quite flexible. Backing up to central location (can be disk or tape) on one main server is available, but each agent can also be configured to backup to its own local drive instead. This is again very useful for PC backups, as they can be configured to backup their most important user files to a second hard drive on the machine without consuming more expensive server disk or tape capacity.
The backup files themselves can optionally be compressed using ZIP compression. In my test this saved about 50% space for the Windows Server 2008 server. The ZIP files can also be password protected and AES encrypted.
Backups can be scheduled and include options for email notifications to backup administrators.
Restoring Files
There are two restore options driven by yet another simple wizard. You can restore either an entire system or perform item-level restores.
Unfortunately there is no bare metal restore capability, but with the speed of modern OS installations (ie Windows 2008 and Windows 7) and alternatives such as Windows Deployment Services it would still be feasible to quickly reinstall an operating system or SOE onto bare metal and then use GFI Backup to recover all of the user data for that system.
Overall Impression
GFI delivers on the ease of use promise with only a few trade offs. I found myself looking for the type of features and settings that I normally see in enterprise class backup products, but quickly realised that the ones that aren’t there are not really necessary for most small to medium businesses anyway.
The lack of support for Exchange and Active Directory backups makes GFI Backup less suited to Windows Small Business Server networks. Theoretically you could use pre and post tasks in GFI Backup to run scripted Windows Backups first, and then backup those files using GFI Backup but that adds a little too much complexity for my liking.
You could also use Windows Backup for those components and GFI Backup for everything else but again that detracts from the ease of use benefits of GFI Backup.
My only other complaint was the lightbox effect in the web administration console, which could perform poorly when remotely supporting clients over low bandwidth connections.
Overall I would consider GFI Backup Business Edition and good backup solution for the small or medium sized business that runs email and other applications in the cloud, and needs a simple backup solution for their Windows PC’s, file servers, and database servers.
Paul is a Microsoft MVP for Office Apps and Services and a Pluralsight author. He works as a consultant, writer, and trainer specializing in Office 365 and Exchange Server.
GFI Backup - Business Edition
GFI Backup - Business Edition provides easy-to-use centralized backup with effortless restore, via a web-based Administration Console. It backs up to all popular storage devices, uses standard Zip archives for restore, meaning no vendor lock-in.
- Publisher: GFi Software
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Backup Thunderbird
Backup Thunderbird is a free Thunderbird backup utility for Windows, it can help you to quickly backup and restore all of your Mozilla Thunderbird E-Mail Messages, Newgroups, RSS Feeds, Address Books, E-Mail Accounts and all other options. Only several mouse clicks, no need any professional knowledge, you can easily backup your E-mail client data.
- Publisher: backupthunderbird.com
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How to backup Thunderbird settings and messages? Use this Thunderbird Backup utility. Thunderbird Backup is a powerful backup tool which will backup all your emails and settings from Thunderbird.
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BitRecover Thunderbird Backup Wizard
Perform backup Thunderbird address book, email folders, inbox, etc. with accurate information. Also Thunderbird Backup Software allows to save Thunderbird mailbox folders to MBOX, Outlook, Apple Mail and Windows Live Mail.
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zebNet® Backup for Thunderbird® Free Edition
zebNet Backup for Thunderbird Free Edition is a free backup and recovery solution with basic features especially designed for Mozilla Thunderbird. Compared to the non-free zebNet Backup for Thunderbird, this free edition provides you with limited functionality, but should perfectly fit your needs if you just need some basic backup and recovery features for your e-mail client.
- Publisher: zebNet® Ltd
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TBBackup
TBBackup is a Thunderbird back up and restore tool. It allows you to backup pretty much every bit of data that Thunderbird keeps on your system into a single file that can be then burned onto a DVD or stored somewhere else for safe keeping. You can then restore the back-up file after a system crash or reinstallation.
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Static Thunderbird Backup
Thunderbird Backup is a powerful backup tool which will backup all your emails and settings from Thunderbird. This wonderful tool can backup all profiles data into an archive. The output archive file name can be generated with time stamp automatically, thus you don't need to type or select the backup archive filename on each time your starting backup process.
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MozBackup
Ableton live lite serial number generator. MozBackup is a small utility that helps you back up in a single file all your profile information belonging to the Mozilla family of tools. The program can read the profile info from applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, SeaMonkey, and Netscape. The backup file will contain info such as bookmarks, browser histories, e-mails, contacts, form auto-fill info, and passwords.
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Ocster Backup Pro
Exceptionally easy and powerful backup tool. Supports Cloud Backup to Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc., as well as backup to local drives or network drives.Creates 50% smaller image backups than competing products.
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Ocster Backup Business 6
Backup optimized for small businesses. Supports remote backup monitoring, online backup (optional), Outlook backup, Thunderbird backup, Firefox backup, contacts backup, 1:1 file copy, versioning, automatic pausing, incremental backup, ..
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Exceptionally easy to set up and yet full of powerful features. Supports full PC backup (image backup), file backup, email backup (Outlook, Thunderbird), browser backup (Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer), contacts backup, .. Playtube free download ios.
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MyPC Backup
Securely backup your PC and Mac files online - access them anytime from a variety of mobile devices including iPhone, IPad and Android devices. Rest assured that you will never lose data again from a hard drive crash, theft or accidental deletion.
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zebNet® Backup for Thunderbird® TNG
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- Publisher: zebNet® Ltd
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KLS Mail Backup
KLS Mail Backup is an easy-to-use backup program that allows you to back up and restore your Windows Mail, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and Firefox profile files.Main features:- Backup to local network drives, Amazon S3, WebDAV and FTP servers.- Standard .zip and .7z compression.- Full and incremental backup mode.- Integrated email viewer.
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Mozilla Thunderbird
Thunderbird is an open source email client which lets you access all your email accounts from the desktop. During initial start, you can add all your email IDs and passwords. After that, you simply have to launch this program to send and receive emails.
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Norton Online Backup
Norton™ Online Backup automatically safeguards your files, music, photos and other important documents from loss. Does all the work for you — automatically backs up your digital photos and videos, downloaded music, financial documents, and other important files to our secured data centers.
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NTI Backup NOW!
Backup Now is a backup solution for end users, small businesses and IT professionals. Its Drive Backup feature can back up your entire computer (operating system, programs, data files, and computer settings); in the event of a hard drive crash, Backup Now can quickly restore your computer back to how it was before the crash.
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Dell Backup and Recovery is a backup and recovery application designed to reliably protect your most important digital documents and memories in just a few clicks.Backing up your data with Dell Backup and Recovery can protect against data loss resulting from:-Virus attack-Accidental file deletion-OS/software corruption-Hardware failure
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