Hey Everyone!

So it's that time again - the time when I pick a piece of Nero 11 apart and tell you all the good and all the bad I've found thus far. Today, I tackle Nero 11's BackItUp module. As before, this is probably going to be a bit more technical than some of the other blog posts out there, so my apologies about that - feel free to ask questions if I was unclear about something =).

As a bit of a background, I remember using Nero BackItUp all the way back in version 6 when it was first released, and did sector level backup, which meant that in order to back up my entire hard disk onto a single CD-R (which, in the days of Windows 98 and 4GByte hard disks, was entirely possible), I had to repartition my hard disk first, otherwise I'd have to provide four CD-R's to represent the empty space. This was especially problematic when I restored from it later on, only to have to edit my partition table with a hex editor and a Texas Instruments calculator in order to get my storage space back. That, my friends, was one of those experiences which made me summarily dismiss BackItUp for the last five iterations. But times have changed, software has been updated, and as an MVP and the self-proclaimed "Yahtzee " (the host of Zero Punctuation, go watch an episode if you never have) of Nero software, I felt that it was my job to give it another go.

I started up the BackItUp module, and as expected, got the welcome/help screen. Good stuff, fairly straightforward. This was extremely encouraging. The single biggest thing I was looking for was essentially a replacement for Acronis True Image, the software I've been using for backup functionality for several years. My use of the software is roughly 90% bootable recovery media, and 10% building that recovery media, so I figured that seeing how Nero fared in that context would be a worthy blog post. So I grabbed a spare Gateway laptop (vintage 2008) off the shelf here at work and proceeded to make a boot disc...

The first thing I found a smidge odd was that BackItUp wanted to know whether I was burning the media to CD or DVD. Being as the image on the DVD was only 100MBytes or so I didn't see why it particularly mattered, but it was an interesting side note just the same.

When I booted the media, I noticed that it was very Linux-y in its usage. I'm not terribly surprised by this since the boot disc is Linux based, but I found that Acronis's boot media did a much better job at 'hiding' the underlying Linux kernel, whilst BackItUp allows for boot switches and a command shell. I'm pleasantly surprised at this, and as it turns out, it became necessary later on.

If you're planning on backing up to a USB external drive, have a Plan B ready. The laptop/Maxtor external hard disk combination I tried wasn't detected by BackItUp; I rebooted twice to verify the case. I found this odd because both Acronis 2010/2011/2012 and Ghost Enterprise 11.5 (the DOS-based one) both see the drive on that laptop no problem. While it's perfectly possible that I'm simply the unlucky sap who got a poor combination of USB hard disk and USB controller, make sure you've got something else around to back up to: A network storage area, for example...

Lucky for me, my laptop has plenty of hard disk space and Filezilla Server installed. While I would love to see an update to BackItUp that includes a "backup target " module that will streamline traversing a firewall and make network configuration unnecessary, Filezilla FTP server is a great piece of open source software that can come in extremely handy at a time like this. I fired it up and pointed BackItUp to the FTP server...or so I thought.

When it comes to the networking config, the GUI seems a bit "whimsical ". When I first started the BIU environment, it told me that it was configuring via DHCP. This was good, because it meant that it detected my network card. However, it didn't detect the wireless card. This is fine, and par for the course for these kinds of tools, but note that you'll need a good old fashioned ethernet cable if you plan on backing up via LAN. Once I did that and switched it to DHCP, it immediately said it was successful...only to not have an IP address leased by the machine. I tried this a couple times, to no avail. I tried manually addressing using the tools available there, but oddly I only got the error message "Could not determine Broadcast Address ". I hadn't any idea why a tool of this nature would need a broadcast IP, or why it couldn't figure one out on a /24 subnet, but alas, that command shell ended up coming in handy.

I went to the command shell and typed the following command:

>>ifconfig

This showed me the list of network adapters it saw, along with their IP addresses. The one I was interested in was the one whose IP started with "169.254 ", in this case, the interface designation was "eth2 ". The way I set this up was to directly connect the two laptops together via an ethernet cable, then enabling Internet Connection Sharing on the destination laptop using the WLAN connection to force DHCP on the hardwired interface. If you're going to attempt this method, you'll need to ensure the following criteria are met:

-The destination laptop is running Windows XP/Vista/7, Home Premium or better for the latter two.

-The wireless connection has an established connection to share.

-At least one of the computers has a gigabit ethernet card in it; 10/100 cards can't auto-negotiate the wire pairs and thus need a specially crimped "crossover cable ". As long as at least one of the NICs are gigabit, doesn't matter which one, a standard ethernet cable will work.

If these criteria aren't met, you're best off connecting through a router or similar, and assigning an IP within the network on that device if you encounter similar difficulties leasing one automatically. In order to assign a static IP address from the command line, here's what you do:

type: "ifconfig " on the command line to see what designation your ethernet port has gotten. If you see one with the IP address of "169.254.x.y " (where x and y are random numbers between 0 and 255), that's your interface. take note of it - in my case it was "eth2 ".

next, type " ifconfig eth2 192.168.137.10 ", if you're doing the Internet Connection Sharing trick above. If you're going through your router, try the same thing, but with the IP address of "192.168.1.222 " or "192.168.0.222 " until the machine in Nero BackItUp can see the rest of the LAN. Oddly enough, running this command automatically determined the subnet and broadcast addresses without needing to be specified, so there's definitely something up in the network config GUI where the left hand and the right hand need to be reintroduced to each other.

So, after figuring all THAT out, I proceeded to make my first backup, using normal compression and 1899MByte chunks. I was pleasantly surprised to find that SFTP was also a supported protocol in addition to regular FTP, so props there. It proceeded to go extremely fast on the upload; faster than Acronis or Ghost have done in the past, so again kudos to outpacing the competition. However, I did have an issue the first time around where it dropped the connection to the FTP server and failed to pick it up again, hovering at the 63% completed mark for 10 minutes before I decided to reboot.

The second time around, it did complete the imaging successfully, but dropped the connection during the verification stage. Since the backup completed successfully, I decided to do another little expedition, namely to see whether selective restoration was possible. One of the big issues that the open source imaging products like PING and Clonezilla haven't addressed yet is that their sector-level backups are all-or-nothing affairs. If you need to restore a particular file out of an image, there's all kinds of fancy footwork required. By contrast, the commercial offerings allow users to browse the images and extract particular files at will, without having to do a complete restore in order to do it. Nero BackItUp has a middle of the road method of doing this. While Acronis treats their image archives in a very similar manner to the way Windows treats ZIP files and Shadow Copies (i.e. transparently through the Windows file explorer), BackItUp does require the user to go through the "restore " process and choose files and folders via the internal file browser, instead of through Windows Explorer. It's not a terrible setup, and it's vastly superior to the sector-based backups that don't allow file restoration at all, but ironically enough the one file format most worthy of a file association that immediately opens BackItUp doesn't have one and as such was a bit less intuitive that I would have liked.

I decided to reboot again and see what would happen if I used a regular shared folder ( "Samba ") instead of FTP to see what would happen. One thing I did find odd was that while file splitting was mandatory for FTP transfers, it wasn't even optional for SMB. The option to split files is always a good thing, since it makes it easier to do uploads later, or archive to disc or to span across multiple volumes. It certainly wasn't a dealbreaker though. Another technical note, if you're like me, you're used to browsing network shares using a pair of backslashes (e.g. \\computer\folder). Since this is Linux, you'll have to substitute the protocol for the pair of backslashes, and forward slashes thereafter (e.g. smb://computer/folder). This one failed as well, but due to user error: the battery died. However, once completed, it did verify successfully without any hiccups or failures. As such, I'd recommend using SMB if you can.

My summary is this: As far as the full disk backup process goes, it works. It works quickly and it does selective restores. I'm glad that it does it, but there is clearly still some polish to be made. The GUI for network configuration needs to work, the USB controller drivers need to work, and the FTP connection needs tweaking. Acronis has all of these things down to a science, which means that they stand out when seen side by side. As such, it ultimately boils down to this: If you've got Acronis, don't stop using it for Nero, because some things are better streamlined. If you've got Nero, the feature set isn't so absymal that it warrants saying "get Acronis instead ".

Joey