Product Reviews & Quotes

Back Ultimate 9.0 provides excellent backup in a friendly interface
Government Computer News -  6/16/2009

The BounceBack software earns our Reviewer’s Choice designation because it is innovative and easy to use and fills an important need in the federal market at a good price.

Back Ultimate 9.0 provides excellent backup in a friendly interface

John Breen II
Government Computer News
6/16/2009

Pros: Flawless backup, can boot system from backup drive, works with any external hard drive
Cons: Nothing significant
Performance: A
Ease of use: A+
Features: A+
Value: A
Government price: $253 as tested with software and drive;$99 for just the software

Backup software is nothing new, but just because something can back up files doesn’t mean it’s simple to use. However, ease of use is BounceBack Ultimate's best feature.

The program has easy-to-understand windows that let users determine what they want to back up and when they want those backups to occur. It’s easy to have, say, just your Word files moved onto a backup drive or just the contents of certain folders or only specific drives. You can even keep older versions of files handy, in case you need to see look back at the original wording sometime down the road.

And with a click, you can set your backup data to be encrypted at Advanced Encryption Standard 128 or AES-256, something feds might appreciate because protecting backup data is just as important as protecting the original files on a main drive — and just as embarrassing or dangerous if stolen.

However, what caught our eye about BounceBack was its ability to format the backup drive with the same file structure and partitions as your laptop or desktop PC’s hard drive. BounceBack goes a step beyond that, making the backup drive pretty much a copy of your main drive to the point that you can even boot up from it without your computer knowing the difference.

The advantage to that approach became obvious recently when a system in the GCN Lab caught a nasty virus. The system happened to be running BounceBack at the time. (OK, we inserted the virus on purpose for our testing, but you get the idea.) The virus did so much damage to the desktop PC’s hard drive that it had to be removed and restored.

Typically, that situation would require that we take the system off-line because computers don’t generally work well without a hard drive. But because the BounceBack software had been making incremental backups, the external drive still had all the vital information. Sounds pretty standard so far, but with BounceBack, we were able to boot the dead system using the external drive attached to the USB port.

Once the system was up and running, there was almost no difference in performance. A few programs took a little longer to open because they had to stream through the USB 2.0 interface, but that was a small price to pay for having a system that worked without any downtime in a crisis.

There are three ways the formerly dead system could have been healed. First, if the hard drive had no physical errors, you could simply restore the drive from the backup. Second, you could remove the external hard drive from its casing and install it as the primary — and identical — hard drive for the system to use. And finally, you could boot the system from the backup drive via the USB connection, as we did in our testing.

The advantage of the third option is that it works even if there are errors on the main drive — or even if the main drive is removed — and it takes no time at all to set up. Just change your BIOS settings so the computer can boot from the USB port if that is not already an option, and you are good to go.

After booting the system from the USB drive, we restored all the data onto the newly wiped main hard drive and continued using everything as usual, confident that an ironclad backup was in place and protecting us.

The system we tested has a government price of $253 for the software and CMS Products' Velocity2 ABSplus drive. Having tested the company’s drives in the past, we knew they are fast and reliable, so $253 is a good price for a 1.5T unit that spins at 7,200 rpm. However, if you already have a backup drive and want to use that instead, you can do so because the BounceBack software will work with any drive. We tested it with several types, both cheap and expensive, and the software worked fine, though backups generally took less time on the high-performing Velocity2.

If you buy the software by itself, it’s $99, which is inexpensive for an easy-to-use backup system. We would recommend getting the Velocity2 as part of the system, but it’s refreshing to find that anyone who wants to use their existing external drives are not shut out of the protection this excellent software offers.

The BounceBack software earns our Reviewer’s Choice designation because it is innovative and easy to use and fills an important need in the federal market at a good price.

The Daily Giz Wiz 846
The Daily Giz Wiz -  6/7/2009

Dick DeBartolo and Leo LaPorte review BounceBack Ultimate on the Daily Giz Wiz.

The Daily Giz Wiz 846

The Daily Giz Wiz
6/7/2009

Dick DeBartolo and Leo LaPorte review BounceBack Ultimate on the Daily Giz Wiz.

Get your computer back to a known good state quickly and easily with BounceBack Ultimate.

Listen to the broadcast

Or stream the entire episode here. The CMS segment begins at 6:18 of the broadcast.

If you’re computer crashes and you don’t have a back up you can’t blame Leo or me. We’ve talked about all kinds of backup solutions. Here’s a brand new one from CMS Products. BounceBack Ultimate disaster recovery and backup software enables you to create an exact copy of the entire contents of your Windows PC hard drive. And when they say complete, they mean it includes the partitioning, formatting, operating system, data files, applications, pictures, music, video and personal settings. Think of this as a “Digital Spare Tire” for your PC! Using BounceBack Ultimate’s patent-pending “Instant PC Recovery” you can start-up your PC directly from your external USB hard drive in the event of an operating system malfunction, or even a mechanically failed hard drive. To prove it, Monica Golden, who works for CMS Products, stopped by my office with a laptop and an external drive loaded with BounceBack Ultimate. I played on the laptop for a few minutes so I could see that it was a normal computer with all the regular programs. Then Monica removed the laptop’s hard drive and plugged the external hard drive with their BB software into a USB port. The computer booted from the external hard drive after she click on “One-Button Recovery” and all the programs I saw earlier where available again. There’s an automatic backup with built-in scheduling. Pricing of this product depends on the drive capacity. For instance a 500GB lists at $200, which includes the full version of BounceBack Ultimate software. You can also buy the program as a stand alone for under $100, or upgrade earlier versions of BounceBack for a lower fee.

BounceBack Ultimate - Fit For Business Review
ITPro Fit For Business -  5/27/2009

If you're not ready for cloud based backup, this solution from CMS will have great appeal for those wanting to get users up and running quickly after a disaster.

BounceBack Ultimate - Fit For Business Review

Dave Stevenson
ITPro Fit For Business
5/27/2009

If you're not ready for cloud based backup, this solution from CMS will have great appeal for those wanting to get users up and running quickly after a disaster. For all the undeniable appeal of cloud storage and, lately, cloud backup, it's hard to argue with those who contend that local, hard disk-based backup is the most reliable and secure. And, even if it weren't these two things, it would still be the fastest.

BounceBack Ultimate is utterly simple. Install the software and you're instantly prompted to create a full system backup. You don't need to decide which files you'd keep in the event of a catastrophe, and you're not cautioned to leave your PC alone while the image is created, although you’ll be prompted to duck out of Microsoft Outlook if it’s running.

Once BounceBack has made its first backup — creating a 24GB backup took slightly over 47 minutes — the true strength of the program becomes clear. Applications such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image might enable you to create rescue media, with which you can re-format your hard disk and restore it to its time of last backup, but BounceBack works differently. It doesn't create a disk image when it's backing up, instead simply plonking them onto your chosen backup hard disk. This sounds simple, but it has its strengths.

Firstly, you can browse your backed up files on any PC, whether or not it has BounceBack installed. Secondly, when you create a full system backup on an external disk, such as a USB drive, you can boot straight into your system from the disk, which gives you access to all your files and applications while you wait to either replace your failed hard disk, or to restore the data to it.

It also makes whichever external backup device you use bootable. If you create a full system backup, you'll be prompted to re-partition and format a USB hard disk, which you're then supposed to keep handy at all times. If your PC goes down, the theory is that you can boot from your USB device straight into your operating system as it was when you last backed up. The ability to load an operating system on a PC without a functioning internal hard disk is troubleshooting nirvana. Alternatively, you can opt to only backup certain files and folders.

This approach has its drawbacks, though. The first is that the backups created by BounceBack are unwieldy and consist of thousands of files. This means moving them from disk to disk is very painful. It also means that if you move your backed-up files from one disk to another disk that isn't bootable, you lose BounceBack's chief benefit. Nor is there any compression — if the total sum of your files is 300GB, your backup will be as well.

But it’s not a straightforward copy job, either – the Ultimate version of BounceBack, reviewed here, includes 256-bit AES encryption, and to restore these encrypted files the user must have Bounceback Ultimate running on the PC.

For fully encrypted backups for sensitive data, users have to purchase CMS’s fully encrypted hard disks – its ABSplus drives, which come complete with BounceBack Professional. CMS company says that it will work directly with companies that choose to go down this route, and that’s it’s not available through the channel.

The management software is simple. Once it’s installed and you’ve made your first backup, you can set a schedule for incremental backups, from as regularly as once per day to as infrequently as once per month. Alternatively, there’s the CDP mode. This stands for Continuous Data Protection, and it works as a kind of on-the-fly backup. This can be run as infrequently as once every hour or, for the truly worried, once per minute.

In use this has the potential to create a performance bottleneck on a user’s PC, but BounceBack’s incremental backups use hardware throttling to keep a system usable while data is added to your backup. There’s no user control for this throttling as there is in Acronis True Image, though. We rarely noticed a slowdown while BounceBack was working on our test machine, though. The only time we reached for the pause button was when it started backing up the Windows registry – an intensive process that made other applications run very slowly indeed.

It’s all straightforward: we were up and running with a fully-working, bootable backup in under two hours, including the time taken to create the first backup. But there are a few drawbacks. The first is the design of the software, which looks like an edutainment application with its massive buttons and clumsy graphics.

We reviewed the end-user application, and for a per seat licence cost of £50 excluding VAT you don’t get anything in the way of corporate controls. If you want to monitor your user’s backups you need to buy CMS’ advanced IT Console program, which creates an SQL database to keep track of users’ database statistics. For those with less advanced needs, you can at least set BounceBack to backup over a network.

The second problem is the cost per seat. BounceBack Ultimate is more expensive than its competitors – Norton Ghost costs £45 and the excellent Acronis True Image 2009 costs £34. BounceBack Ultimate is potentially more useful if you want minimum downtime: a constantly-updated, reliable USB drive that will load straight into Windows could be invaluable.

There’s still plenty to be said for image-based backups, though. They’re easier to move around (moving one large file is faster than moving many small ones) and can be compressed to take up less space. And, applications such as Acronis allow you to create recovery CDs that will reload a disc image, although unlike BounceBack Ultimate, you can’t run them live. It all comes down to the ability to boot straight into your backup – if this sounds like heaven, BounceBack is a great choice.

BounceBack Ultimate 9.0
Tom's Hardware -  5/26/2009

Your graduate can rest easy because the precious business data on that external drive won’t fall into the wrong hands—it is safeguarded with 256-bit encryption.

BounceBack Ultimate 9.0

Tom's Hardware
5/26/2009

Some graduates will attempt to go into business for themselves, and for those that do, a serious data-protection policy is in order. We recommend CMS Products’ BounceBack Ultimate software, which will keep all your graduate’s data archived and bring his or her computer back from the dead. The software works with any hard drive (though the hard drive has to be bigger than the computer’s memory). It backs up new or changed files every time the hard drive is connected to the PC in question, saves various versions of each file, copies the entire operating system, and can hum along in the background doing its business while someone is working on the PC. When the unthinkable happens to the PC—a failed hard drive or corrupted operating system—the computer can boot right off the external hard drive. When it is time to restore the computer from the external drive to a new internal drive, you can pick and choose what you want to restore—or restore it all. The data can even be restored onto two computers, such as home and office PCs. Your graduate can rest easy because the precious business data on that external drive won’t fall into the wrong hands—it is safeguarded with 256-bit encryption.

Hard drive backups made easy
Philadelphia Daily News -  5/11/2009

Here are some backup products that will save those treasures. Better yet, they're easy to use and reasonably priced.

Hard drive backups made easy

Jonathan Takiff
Philadelphia Daily News
5/11/2009

THE GIZMO: Computer backup drives from CMS Products and Storage Appliance Corporation.

Back in the '80s, pop stars Madonna and Sting sang about living in a "material world." Nowadays, many of
our most valuable possessions _ documents, correspondence, music, video, photographs and more _ reside
only as digital bits on a hard−disk drive or flash memory that could go "poof" in a computer crash.

Here are some backup products that will save those treasures. Better yet, they're easy to use and reasonably
priced.

'THE DIGITAL SPARE TIRE': That's what CMS Products president Ken Burke calls his $160 (in 160 GB
form) ABSplus external laptop backup and recovery drive with BounceBack Ultimate software. It's the first
product that this established business−tech company is also directing at the consumer market.

Yes, there are dozens of external drives that can back up the data on your computer's disk drive. But the
BounceBack Ultimate software preloaded on ABSplus drives (available separately for under $100) lets these
storage devices do a lot more.

BounceBack copies ALL the software on your Windows XP or Vista PC (not Macs, sorry). That includes the massive core of the operating system, usually not saved by a backup drive.

Whenever you plug it in, it makes a snapshot/update of everything that's changed. Plus, the device features
"Instant PC Recovery" recuperative powers (patent pending).

So if your OS malfunctions or your hard drive freezes, just shut off the computer, then restart. The little external ABSplus drive will take over the role of primary drive either to reload an earlier version of the main drive's contents (before a file corrupted or a virus snuck in) or to run the show for a day, a week, as long as necessary.

IT'S MAGIC: "Having our drive available for instant replacement takes the pressure off," said Burke. "You
don't have to pay an expert a ton of money to recover information from a bad disk. You know, those guys set
their fee based on the tone of desperation in your voice."

ABSplus also lets you synchronize the contents of similar office and home computers. Just move the palm−sized, lightweight drive from PC to PC, plug it in and watch everything update. Sensitive files can be secured with encryption. And reasonably sturdy construction _ with memory foam surrounding the drive - helps the device take a lickin' and keep on tickin'.

WE PLUG IN: I must caution that I ran into complications trying to connect an ABSplus drive to a five−year−old Sony Vaio laptop. Later, I found a note on the CMS Web site that it's best to use BounceBack Ultimate software with computers made in 2006 or later.

But the device connected like a charm with a 2005 (!) XP Media Center−edition HP Pavilion desktop. Go
figure. The transfer of all contents took more than 90 minutes, with the biggest chunk of time devoted to porting the
Windows OS and digital copies of movies - each at least a Gigabyte. Updates happen quickly, though, and in
the background so as not to disturb your work.