A three-time PCMag Editors' Choice, SOS Online Backup just keeps getting better, lengthening the gap between it and the competition. New for SOS Online Backup 5.0 are Facebook backup, improved iPhone and Android apps, Mac support, and a greatly streamlined PC setup process. The new version improves on the software's already fast upload and download speeds. Pricing options, too, once a comparative weak point, continue to improve, with a new 100GB plan that covers up to five computers costing just $75 a year for a two-year plan. And a new pricing plan adds to its attractiveness: $9.95 a month for five PCs and up to 50GB of data looks good even compared with all-you-can-eat services like Carbonite ($54.95/year, 3 stars), which charges $4.95 a month for just one PC. SOS Online Backup Home Edition remains a favorite for its abundance of useful features and its clear, friendly interface.
Installing and Setting Up
With version 5, SOS Online gets even simpler to set up your backup processing. The software's setup wizard was already industry leading, but it's become even smarter. Right up front, you still get the choice of "UltraSave," which means no one but you will be able to get at your backed up files?not even SOS staff. Only check this box if you're positive you'll never forget or lose your password. In the second screen of the setup dialog, the service scans your PC for good backup candidates: documents, images, music, and video. You can tell the wizard to scan all folders, or just the most common ones, or manually choose them.
An Advanced button lets you exclude particular folders?in short, you can be as controlling or laissez-faire as you like. I appreciated how it knew that a CR2 was an image file, though not the standard JPG, GIF, or BMP. In the next step, I could drill into the folder trees that were selected for backup and make additions or exclusions. Here, I could also enable LiveProtect for files that I might update often. A nice thing about the wizard is that you can go backward and forward through it as much as you need?your first choices are not irrevocable. And if the wizard isn't self-explanatory enough, there's a step-by-step video, installation guide, and support options.
Backup can take place when you're not logged in and without your presence. You can choose to backup hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly at a specified time, and have a report mailed on completion. ?
Once your backup is rolling along, SOS Online Backup's new interface makes any operations you may need afterward plain as day. Two large tabs offer Backup and Restore. The Backup page lets you re-run the setup wizard, start a backup immediately, or set up a local backup.
Local Backup
As with any of the more advanced online backup services, SOS lets you create local backups as well as online ones. This makes getting to many or large files faster, without the need for an online transaction. But SOS's default location for backup was on the same hard drive; I'd prefer to see it suggest an external drive before defaulting to this. SOS offers backup to local connected storage, another plus, but I wish it let you simply use the same chosen backup set of files as the one you chose for online storage, as Norton Online Backup does.
While a backup is taking place, you can summon the Backup progress window from the program's animated tray icon. The file operations really whip by in this new version. From this dialog, you can pause or cancel the current operation. You can also open details showing exactly what files are being processed. Files are encrypted, compressed, and sent up to the servers in 5MB batches.
The latest version of SOS adds a "So Simple" system scan for files that would commonly be desirable backup candidates?office documents, images, music, and video. The first time you run SOS, a message box pops up asking if you want to run this. And if that's not enough, the top choice in Step 1 of its Wizard, "What do you want to back up," is Common Files and Folders, which offer the typical Desktop, Documents, Favorites, and Pictures options. Just check these, and in most cases you're golden, but you also have the option to select any folder on your hard drive. Unlike Carbonite, SOS also lets you choose external USB drives and keys, and even network drives. But for the last to work, I had to disable my antivirus app during installation, and 64-bit Windows 7 had some issues with the feature.
Another way to choose files or folders for backup is simply to right click on their entry in Windows Explorer and choose "Protect with SOS Online Backup" from the resulting menu. This is the only Explorer option: Carbonite goes deep with this feature, actually marking each protected file and folder with a color-coded dot.
A third way to configure your backup set is to launch the service's Classic View, which offers more detailed control. From this interface, you can drag and drop files for backup, browse all your disk contents, start a backup immediately, or restore particular files and folders.
For critical files, you can enable SOS's Live Protect feature, which will watch the file and immediately send update info to the backup servers; this feature is unmatched in rival services like Carbonite. I only wish you could designate folders as well as files for live protection. Other advanced settings let you choose file types to back up, suggesting the typical Word, Excel, and photo file types. You can also enter your own custom file extensions for either inclusion or exclusion from the backup set.
The default scheduling option is once daily in the wee hours. But you can increase it to hourly. Of course, only file changes will be uploaded, so it won't usually require enormous data transfers except for the first upload. Checkboxes let you choose whether to run the backup unattended, even if the user is logged out, and to send email reports on the backup's progress.
SOS backs up files in roughly 10K batches, processing them ahead of time with encryption and compressing and confirming the backed up file after upload. You can view a simple or detailed dialog showing what it's doing, how much work remains, and the files being uploaded. And from this, you can pause the backup and resume it later. It would be a little more convenient to be able to pause from the tray, icon, as Carbonite lets you.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/LBJPFux2cuk/0,2817,2371307,00.asp
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