Yosemite FileKeeper Pro 2.8 - PC review

Full Review

When was the last time you backed up your hard drive? We bet it wasn’t recently enough to protect you from losing vital data should it crash right now? A recent study carried out by Yosemite revealed that 76% of notebook users never backup their data, which is an alarming number.

One of the main reasons for this is the difficulty at getting to grips with backup software, which is why Yosemite has gone to great lengths to simplify the process, so that making full backups should be easy and a minimum of fuss.

Once you’ve installed the software you’ll find that it places an icon in your System Tray and apart from your initial full backup, this is a surprisingly easy piece of software to use. You won’t find it insisting that a backup be made. In fact, we found dialogue boxes to be less frequent than we’ve found with rival products.

The reason for this is that most software insists you pick a routine backup schedule but FileKeeper works by using Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for making continuous backups. It does this using two different approaches to backups. For files you are working on, such as Word or Excel files that are changed and saved repeatedly as you work, each change can be backed up continuously.

One neat trick of this continuous backup of open files is the rollback feature, that allows you to right-click on a file and see its Save history. So, if you need to switch back to an earlier version you can do so without it changing the main file.

Then there are the programs that stay open for long periods of the day, such as your email client, which can be saved as a snapshot at a given time, such as on the hour or even half-hourly.

If this all sounds as though it’s labour intensive, we found that it ran in the background of a standard dual-core notebook with minimal interference, so we could continue to surf the web and work at the same time.

This product is best used by notebook users, as they are not likely to have as constant access to a network as a desktop PC. With this in mind, you can elect to save backups to any external device, such as a USB memory stick or portable hard drive. Then again, if you want to save files to a network device, the software will save changes to a local disk when you are unconnected and instantly transfer them across when you’re back at your desk.

Verdict

Yosemite FileKeeper Pro 2.8 won’t change your life, but it will change the way you view backing up your notebook. It’s easy to get to grips with and the minimal asking price makes it a great investment - especially if you use your notebook out and about for long periods of the day.

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