Drive Backup 9.0 Express – a really bad start

I'm slowly weaning myself off Vista on my home PC and onto Ubuntu, because Vista just continues to disappoint me day after day.  I've pared my Vista install down to just the basics now, and I'm setting it up to dual-boot to either Vista or Ubuntu.

Paragon Software Group

Before I go messing with boot sectors, though, I plan to take a backup of my system.  The last experience I had with Windows Backup wasn't stellar, and as luck would have it, I just read a blog post announcing a free personal backup program from Paragon Software Group called Drive Backup Express.  It's supposed to be really simple, and really foolproof.  Perfect, I thought - I'm in!

So I went to download this dandy little app last night, and wouldn't you know, it was downloading really slowly.  No big deal - I let the download run and went to bed.  I sat down tonight to install, and the install started giving me "can't read archive" errors.  Oh, oh.  Not the sort of message you want to see from your backup program.

I figured I'd better download again, so I kicked off a fresh download, and the darned thing said it was going to take something like 2 hours to download 70-some Meg.  I haven't seen speeds like that since dial-up.  So once again, I left for a while, came back, and the download said it completed, but it only showed a file size of 23 Meg.  Sure enough, when I went to run it, I had the same corrupt archive problems again.

A few years ago, I remember jumping on fresh downloads of development tools, browsers, Linux distros, and so on, and fighting for a day or two at a time to get downloads to complete.  I hadn't realized how far we'd come since then until just now.

If you offer a product or service, no matter how good the end result, please remember that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.  I'm not sure I'll ever find out whether Drive Backup Express is worth the time of day, because I still haven't managed to get the damned thing to download.

We're past download capacity being an acceptable reason for a lousy experience, and I'm done waiting.  I'm going to go start my backup with Windows Backup now.

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2 Replies to “Drive Backup 9.0 Express – a really bad start”

  1. hmm, mine is ever worse. I downloaded it, installed it, and backed up my first full drive image. I lost every other 140GB of data in that drive after i did this. I am not happy at all. I am not sure how that happened. It's a crap application or my external us drive is crappy.

  2. hmm, mine is ever worse. I downloaded it, installed it, and backed up my first full drive image. I lost every other 140GB of data in that drive after i did this. I am not happy at all. I am not sure how that happened. It's a crap application or my external us drive is crappy.

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