Anyone has tried out the Disk Hero backup utility for U3?
http://www.diskhero.com/u3-details.cfm
I would like to hear your comments about it.
Thanks!
New: Run-Command (Dec 2, 2024), Platform 29.5.3 (Jun 27, 2024)
1,100+ portable packages, 1.1 billion downloads
No Ads Nov/Dec!, Please donate today
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
And that should be read as slooooooooo---- OWWW!!!!
This is probably not really appropriate for this forum, but I want to save others my experience with this 'app'
I tried it. Liked the 'free for U3' idea. The warned that the initial run would take some time. I have a 2g drive about 3/4 full. (around 700M free).
After 12 hours, it was STILL less than 50% done. And their web interfase is just as SLOOOOOOOOW.
Now the OWW!!!! part (and any conclusions I state at this point are purely conjecture): I went to bed while it was still running, and when I woke up I had a dead flash drive. It seems that it does *ALL* of it's writing (and that's a *LOT*) to the drive. It appears it writes status info to the drive for EACH AND EVERY FILE ON THE DRIVE. My suspicion is that it it 'wrote my drive to death'. I cannot prove this. Even if this had not happened, this app (IMHO) is way to slow for use in a mobile environment.
I am currently trialing Backup4All 3 and find it MUCH more flexible and powerful. Of course, it's not free.
The only good part of the story is that diskhero managed to back up my most critical data before trashing my drive. I installed the app on another drive just long enough to restore what I could before removing it.
Indeed it's slow.. Beyond slow. I watched their little video thing and it was funny how that guy was just sitting there saying nothing as it uploaded and downloaded... xD Moment of silence
I stopped it after about 30 minutes. Maybe longer, and my drive would have been fried. It heated it up pretty bad...
Save yourself and just don't use it.
I personally have used it, and I like the concept. The initial backup took a very long time, but once it was finished, I found it to be very useful when I didn't have my drive with me. Not sure about downloading whole folders, but pretty good app overall.
-Jason--
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks.
-Jason--
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks.
Comment from Disk Hero
The overall speed of our backup process is governed primarily by the upload speed of the Internet connection, and the speed of the U3 drive.
Note: U3 drives are not all the same speed – ref: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/104927/verbatim-u3-smart-drive.html
The entire Disk Hero backup process for one 10MB file takes approximately 10 minutes on a DSL line with an upload speed of 256K.
So if you were trying to backup 1GB of data it would have taken nearly 17 hours.
Note: with a T-1 line the total time for 1GB of data drops to just under 3 hours
Since 87% of the time needed for a backup is the upload process, the speed up process we are planning will only save about 34 minutes (of your 17 hours), but it will avoid any “heating” up that might occur on the U3 drive.
Note: Our development and testing was done with earlier 1 GB U3 drives and a test file of 100MB. The initial backup would complete in less than 2 hours with a 256K upload connection, which is why we advised that it would take some time.
Want to discuss?
Wayne@DiskHero.com
your time or your money on a backup program? If you're not syncing your flash drive back to your main PC, why not just copy the U3 Documents and System folders to a location on the main PC and be done with it?
Who uses traditional backup programs anymore anyway?
I have a very high-speed connection (1.5 up) and after hours (maybe 3) my 500MB of data still wasn't uploaded (I think I pulled the plug after 160MB). I love the idea of Disk Hero and think it has a great deal of potential. I just got worried that it would never actually upload all of my data. So my question would be - is compressing and uploading the data from the stick itself? That could cause it to slow down massively. It would be great if you could say use this hard drive to compress and cache the upload.
I also found the app interface, a bit busy and confusing. Lots of different pieces of information but I wasn't sure what they all meant. For example, what was the backup plan it was building and where was the gas gauge that just showed how much I had uploaded, how much was left, and estimated time to completion?
I may give it another try but the app definitely needs some speed improvements and some UI clean up.
I've been using it for over a year now. It has serious problems - the most recent version of many of my files are *not* backed up automatically. I've reported these problems, and they still not fixed.
It also does not clean up files that have been deleted. It's supposed to after some period, but I've got files on the server that were deleted or moved months ago. The result is that the space on the server is much more than it should be.
I'm hoping they'll fix this thing, but ... Meanwhile I back up my U3 by copying the entire contents to a PC that is backed up by Mozy - now that's a program that does it right...
William
Ugh, I forgot about this utility.
Stay away! Far away! It doesn't work right, it is slow, and it will bring you trouble and frustrations, at least in my experience.
Jeff32