Just a quick, fun thing to share here. I've been taking a look at backup software over the past week, trying to decide what to use to back up a few additional PCs I have. I've written about backup software before, but this time I'm looking for something that handles the network backups a little bit better than the Acronis home series.

One software product I began looking into tonight is Novastor NovaBACKUP Professional. I have never used it before and found it via some searching. One unique feature it has is the ability to run a file copy/synchronize between two locations without writing data to a proprietary backup format file. No other backup software I've been testing recently does that. The functionality is very similar to Microsoft's SyncToy.

I thought I'd throw the largest thing that I have at this feature, which turns out to be a 100-plus gigabyte archive of photographs I've taken over the years. The source was the photo archive on my Drobo S. The destination is a network share on an old server that I have. After setting the options, I started the copy, got up and let it run for a bit.

I would have loved to finish the test, but I don't think I have quite this long to mess around!

Now, to be fair to Novastor, the destination server is old (HP Netserver LH3) and has some problems with file copies over the network. I still thought four years to finish was pretty funny. Maybe Novastor needs to take a look at how they're calculating their estimates under less-than-ideal conditions. Would it have really taken that long? I doubt it, but I'm not willing to find out!

If you're as lazy as I, you may have been using the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) until just recently. Why just recently? If you're not in the know, Windows 7 was released for sale in October of last year. Before then, the RC was made publicly available May 5, 2009, with a beta version available before then. During the RC phase, it was well known that the RC version of Windows 7 was set to begin shutting down your PC every two hours starting on March 1. How time flies! A friendly reminder from Microsoft (pictured here) sparked the motivation I needed to kick start my Windows 7 release version installation. Time to get started. More...