Entered CNET Catalog: 03/03/2006
SKU: CNETWINBACKUPPRO
Manufacturer: LIUtilities
Product summary
The good: Intuitive interface; good data-verification and encryption features; affordable.
The bad: Shortcuts feature supports only a few Windows programs; tech support could be better.
The bottom line: WinBackup 2 Professional, a well-designed file-backup program for Windows, is intuitive and powerful; it's a solid buy for small-business owners.
User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
User Rating: 
2/10
Their registry booster n driverscanner are dangerous!
Pros: Support is poor and they broke my computer
Cons: I ran their registry scanner and driver scanner. Now my secondary monitor not recognized my my computerand the computer is much slower. They don't have phone support and no one has responded to the online support request filed a couple of days ago.
User Rating: 
1/10
DO NOT USE !!!
Pros: Nice shape/color icon
Cons: Backs up files not requested for backup, crashes system, slow
User Rating: 1/10
Users beware!!!
Pros: Very nice and shining
Cons: Trojan included at no cost :)
User Rating: 2/10
Nightmare ordering process
Pros: Wish I knew
Cons: Only one vendor, I can not get the product
I read the review and ordered the product. The only way to get it is to download it. They sent me an email saying click here to go to the download page. I did that clicked on download and I got an error message. Too late to call the company I sent them an email. Next day I get home, I have an email from Sonic@Digital River. A different company, they said to clean out my cookies. What??? They have a link in their email to a download site, I go there, it says enter your email address and last 5 digits of your credit card number. I put that in, press enter, and I wind up at Symantec downloading a rebate form for Norton System Works, a product I purchased 2 weeks ago. I call the company. Of course they are not open.
Tomorrow they saga will continue.
Part 2
Got up early this morning and called before leaving for work. The Sonic staff said that my firewall was preventing the download. I told them I did not have a firewall and that I can download from CNET anytime with no problems and from any web site I have ever had to download from. They would not budge and just kept repeating that my firewall was the problem. Finally I just had to demand a refund. Then I was sent back to Atomic Park who requested that I fill out a form that they emailed me and return it to them.
I proposed that they just mail me the product on a disk, but they said this was not possible. So no product.
User Rating: 
3/10
Great software with serious restore flaw!
Pros: user interface, backup process, open file manager
Cons: serious flaw in restoring incremental backups
Each time you do an incremental backup, WinBackup copies only new/changed files. When you want to restore a file or set of files, you have to choose which backup file to restore from.
Since incremental backups only copy new/changed files, you are forced to search through many, many backup files to find the file you want. Even worse, if you are backing up a data directory, such as a QuickBooks folder, some of the data files & index files will change, and some won't, over time.
So if your QuickBooks data gets corrupted and you need to restore the entire data folder, you will have to manually search through *every* incremental backup file (starting backwards) to find all of the files which comprise the data folder. Since you may not even know what files existed in that folder, it's a very difficult task.
What is needed is a version administrator, as part of WinBackup, which knows which files live in which incremental backup archives. BounceBack has features like this (though that program is horrible for lots of other reasons).
User Rating: 
9/10
A great backup software
Pros: The Outlook Agent is awsome! The user interface makes it possible even for me to perform a backup.
Cons: not much to say
User Rating: 
4/10
Works well but tech support and housekeeping leave much to be desired
Pros: Solid, easy to use reliable backup & restore
Cons: Uniblue is unresponsive to e-mails & Winbackup leaves Outlook with errors after uninstall
After downloading the trial version I immediately got a friendly e-mail from Uniblue asking if I had any questions. I did have and replied immediately with lots of valuable feedback to them and my questions. I am still waiting for a reply to my e-mail 2 weeks later!
I decided to uninstall and go with another solution. After removal via control panel/ add and remove programs there were two issues.
(1) Registry was not cleanup up properly. This is all too common but still sloppy in my opinion.
(2)I was left with errors when starting up OUTLOOK. The uninstall process did not remove the WinBackup add in for OUTLOOK. Detect/repair did not solve the problem. I had to manually look for and disable the add in before OUTLOOK started up cleanly again.
I intensly dislike software that does not clean up properly when uninstalled and leaves the user with problems that they need to figure out on their own. On this count alone WinBackup lost out with me.
