Online storage seems to be all the rage at the moment. We're seeing more and more security suites offer this form of backup option, along with announcements from companies such as O2 and its Bluebook service. It's not difficult to work out why this is a growing trend: with Internet speeds increasing and the price of storage decreasing, it's an efficient and convenient way to make copies of your most important files.

Roxio's BackOnTrack Online is a dedicated service that specifically offers automatic data backup and restore to the home user, via an online account with no limits on capacity. Setup is straightforward; all you need is an e-mail address and password and you're good to go.

Once installed on your computer the software automatically selects your documents, settings, photos, e-mails and music, though if you'd rather have more specific control you can opt for the manual option to choose content yourself.

The software integrates with Windows Explorer to offer an additional option to the right-click menu when you select files or folders. You can manually select content to backup in this way, at which point a coloured dot is displayed alongside the icon, with a yellow dot representing a file waiting to be backed up and green meaning the file has been backed up. This is a nice way to quickly work out what's safe and what isn't at a glance.

There's not a lot to the application itself. The main interface shows the current status of your backup drive and the progress of any backups or restores currently running. You have three configuration options that allow you to disable the coloured dot system, set the software's Internet usage to low priority so it doesn't interfere with other tasks such as VOIP calls, and put the software into ‘recover' mode which temporarily disables any new backups.

There's a recovery log that you can use to view recent activity, and if you choose to restore files they're loaded in a typical Windows Explorer view so you have total control over exactly what is copied back to your computer. Everything you send is securely encrypted for peace of mind and deleted files are retained within your backup set for a month in case you decide you want to recover them at a later date.

In practice, the performance of Roxio's service left us with mixed feelings. On the upside, the process is unobtrusive: we didn't notice any slowdown while backing up or restoring data, and once correctly configured it'll work quietly in the background without interrupting you.

On the downside, it's very slow. The software does make an effort to inform you that the initial upload at least could take quite some time, and quotes speeds of (depending on your service) around 3GB of backups and 10-20GB of restores per day.

In our test, we found it took about 30 minutes to backup 100MB of data and around the same time to restore it, which does seem like and awfully long time, particularly if you're working with big files. This may not be a big concern for most people, though, and if you're happy to live with these sorts of timescales - perhaps leaving your backups running overnight - the advantages of the software will undoubtedly make up for it.

Verdict
We're not quite sure why Roxio's BackOnTrack is so slow, but advantages such as unlimited storage and the ability to work quietly in the background make it an effective solution. It's not particularly customisable, but if you're a fan of the no-nonsense approach it should serve you well.

Company: Roxio

Contact: 0844 448 5500

Tags: backup windows explorer roxio bluebook computer file windows site management operating system