BounceBack Essentials Offers Easy PC Recovery
PC World -  11/25/2009

BounceBack Essentials combines the strengths of imaging, file-based backup. It's quite possibly the best $30 backup solution on the market.

BounceBack Essentials Offers Easy PC Recovery

Jon L. Jacobi
PC World
11/25/2009

There's something about maintaining a complete and up-to-date copy of your entire operating system and software installation that brings you peace of mind. In that regard, CMS's BounceBack Essentials 9.1 calms your soul, and does so flawlessly with as little user intervention as possible.

Note that the software I tested bore the name BounceBack Essentials, but you'll also see BounceBack CDP or Instant PC Recovery depending on where you look (the company has a penchant for multiple labels). BounceBack Essentials is a $29 subset of the company's BounceBack Ultimate software. The Ultimate package--which offers additional features such as encryption, multiple destinations, and point-in-time recovery--costs $69. Essentials keeps only the current version of any file in one location--in effect, mirroring your main system, much like a RAID setup. Essentials requires a dedicated drive with enough room for all your data to perform its magic.

Installing BounceBack Essentials is easy, requiring only a few clicks and correctly entering a serial number. The installer leaves an icon on the Windows Desktop called BounceBack Setup which invokes the initial backup where you select a drive to back up to. After you've made your selection, the software partitions it, renders it bootable, and copies your PC's contents onto it.

Once the initial backup is finished, simply leave BounceBack running in the background and adjust the continuous data protection to taste. BounceBack can be set to save changes at anywhere from 1-minute to 60-minute intervals. While 1 minute may sound like the best option, if you're hit by spyware or some such, the short interval may allow BounceBack to copy the offending files to the backup drive before you even realize there's a problem. Under most circumstances you should leave it set to 15 minutes or more (BounceBack defaults to 60).

The BounceBack backup is actually less prone to malware than the mirrored array it mimics, as it copies the Registry only once a day unless you invoke an incremental backup manually. Since a lot of malware creates a way to launch by altering the Registry, restoring the Registry removes any entries the malware wrote (shutting off your PC by pulling the plug keeps Windows from saving the hacked Registry in the first place).

BounceBack Essentials allows you to boot from the drive it's backing up to if your main installation fails--a great feature that allows you to keep on working when you're on a deadline. When you're finished, you may restore your system wholesale--but you can also browse the backup drive to copy files off piecemeal, since the backup is file-based. The software worked perfectly, restoring my PC with a minimum of fuss.

BounceBack Essentials combines the strengths of imaging, file-based backup, and RAID mirroring, and sidesteps most of the disadvantages of these other methods. It's quite possibly the best $30 backup solution on the market.

2GB Vault OTG Secure Encrypted Flash Drive
Smart Computing - Ovation -  9/1/2009

Securing on-the-go data is of the utmost concern for anyone transferring sensitive information to a USB drive.

2GB Vault OTG Secure Encrypted Flash Drive

Joanna Safford
Smart Computing - Ovation
9/1/2009

Securing on-the-go data is of the utmost concern for anyone transferring sensitive information to a USB drive. CMS Products took this into consideration when constructing the Vault OTG Encrypted Flash Drive. Immediately after you plug the drive into your PC’s USB port, the pre-encryption window appears and asks for a pass phrase.

As soon as you remove the drive from any PC, it automatically locks to prevent unwanted tampering. Protected by a three-year warranty, the Vault OTG supports Windows 2000/XP/Vista and leaves no trace of activity after it’s unplugged.

Portable Storage Pros & Cons
PC Today -  8/1/2009

CMS VaultOTG turns a portable storage con (the chance of data theft) into a pro (it has data encryption).

Portable Storage Pros & Cons

Marty Sens
PC Today
8/1/2009

Got your presentation? Check. Your PDF brochures and product photos? Check. How about your movie collection for your downtime in the hotel room? Check.

Life on the road just wouldn’t be the same without your smartphone or laptop. Seriously, how much work could you get done on a business trip without them?

Likewise, any business traveler worth his salt has a respectable number of gigabytes of storage in his pocket. With a stout USB flash memory drive or a pint-sized portable hard drive, you, too, will be able to bring your digital life with you wherever you go.

Of course, this massively awesome portable convenience has its downside, too. We know that mobile storage is essential to you and your work (and play), so here’s a candid look—category by category—at its pros and cons.

Capacity

It’s pretty intense to think that a 2.5-inch portable hard drive can hold the equivalent of 20 BDs (Blu-ray Discs), but today’s 500GB brutes can do just that. That’s half a terabyte, by the way. More pocketable mobile repositories based on 1.8-inch hard drives currently weigh in at as much as 240GB. And both capacity figures are marching upward all the time.

On the flash front, you have a nice selection of USB thumb drives with a maximum of 64GB on tap. That’s about 13 DVDs’ worth of data, and like the capacities of mobile hard drives, it will only go up from there.

Susceptibility To Damage

Portability implies movement, and movement occasionally means impacts. Personally, we don’t know any heavy mobile device users who haven’t dropped a gadget now and again.

Despite their relative toughness compared to bigger 3.5-inch hard drives, 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch portable units can break. They use spinning disks and swinging read/write heads to store and retrieve data. A hard drive’s moving parts are cleverly designed to last for years of continuous operation (as long as they don’t get too hot), but a nasty fall on the concourse can end it all. This is the reason why some manufacturers “ruggedize” their drives with shock-absorbing materials for better impact resistance.

Flash memory drives aren’t immune to physical danger, either. It’s true that they have no moving parts, but accidents and static discharge can kill them stone dead. We’ve even seen a low-quality computer power supply fry USB drives with too much voltage, so be careful where you plug yours in.

CMS VaultOTG turns a portable storage con (the chance of data theft) into a pro (it has data encryption).

Portability

Size matters. You’ll no doubt relegate a 2.5-inch hard drive to your notebook bag, but a 1.8-inch model might find a place in your shirt pocket. And the ultimate pocketable storage device is the USB flash drive, of course. We’re not talking about ruggedized ones with rubber jackets that bind in your pockets; we’re talking about the slim, trim jobs that you can forget you’re carrying. Some thumb drives should really be called thumbnail models, as they’re no bigger and hardly thicker.

However, with extreme portability comes an obvious danger: Tiny drives are easy to lose. Sure, it’s cool that your wafer-thin flash drive rivals your phone’s teensy memory card for size, but all it takes is a stiff wind or an errant jacket sleeve to send it flying. If the drive is small enough, you won’t even hear it hit the floor.

As for theft, your notebook or iPhone is much more likely to be stolen than your storage device. Still, whether you lose a drive or someone takes it, the problem is the same: You’ve lost your potentially sensitive data.

Security

Fortunately, many flash and portable hard drives now come with encryption software, which can guard your stuff by making it unreadable to anyone but you. Most programs let you set a password to protect all or part of the drive, such as a hidden storage partition only you know about.

Some upscale drives even come with hardware encryption modules that are even tougher to hack. Units suitable for government or military use may come with even stronger security measures, such as the ability to shred data remotely in case whoever finds a lost drive plugs it into an Internet-connected computer.

Encryption aside, though, portable drives possess inherent security risks. Like external hard drives and floppy diskette drives before them, USB flash drives have become targets of malware writers worldwide. Because of their ubiquity, thumb drives have become important vectors for viruses and worms. Couple that threat with paranoia over employee data theft, and you can understand why the IT staff gets nervous tics whenever they see someone plug a flash drive into a PC on the network.

If you don’t want your brand-new portable drive to be locked out of your work computer, ask your IT department how you can make it comply with its security policies.

Software

One of the cool things about mobile drives is that many of them come with portable applications, meaning programs you can run directly from a drive with-out installing anything on the public or borrowed computer you’re using. Not only does this make it more likely that you’ll be allowed to borrow a PC a second time, but it also lets you have the same settings and the same productivity software wherever you go. Another plus: Some portable browsers will let you access the Internet anonymously without leaving a trace of your activities on the host PC.

Power

Finally, portable storage drives have one huge advantage over their 3.5-inch deskbound cousins: They don’t need AC adapters. Because virtually all mobile drives get their power through one or two USB ports (called bus power), you won’t have to cart along a “wall wart” and hunt for power outlets.

The Verdict

All in all, we’re confident that portable storage has more going for it than it has holding it back. That said, you’ll need to be smart about what you buy and how you use it.

This compact pocket drive backs up absolutely everything
Laptop Magazine -  7/1/2009

This compact pocket drive backs up absolutely everything, including your operating system, in case of notebook hard drive failure.

This compact pocket drive backs up absolutely everything

Jeffrey L. Wilson
Laptop Magazine
7/1/2009

In order to preserve important documents, photos, music, and video, an external hard drive is essential for keeping your data backed up on another source should your notebook suffer from hard drive failure. CMS adds an extra layer of functionality with the ABSplus, a $180 250GB portable storage drive that lets you to stay productive even when your notebook’s hard disk gets fried. This device allows you to boot an exact copy of your entire PC (including the operating system) via a USB 2.0 port.

Design
Measuring 5.0 x 3.0 x 1.1 inches, the gray-and-black ABSplus is bulkier than such svelte pocket drives as the Seagate FreeAgent Go, but at 7 ounces, it’s also lighter. The face of the drive features subtle curves reminiscent of a sports car’s hood, a black-and-gold CMS emblem, and a blue power light. Flipping over the 250GB drive, you’ll find three rubber feet for securing it to a table, as well as a built-in USB 2.0 cable tucked away in a groove of the body. This durable drive is designed to withstand pressure of up to 1,000 Gs.

Upon connecting the ABSplus to our Gateway P-7808u FX (our testbed for storage evaluations), Windows’ autorun feature prompted us to install the preloaded BounceBack Ultimate Backup software. After installation, it took approximately 40 minutes for the software to properly format and prep the drive, and then another 63 minutes for it to copy 127GB of system data. During that time, we saw no negative performance hit as we went about our daily activities.

BounceBack Ultimate Backup Software
The bundled software allowed us to do many of the things you’d expect from modern backup software (such as 256-bit AES encryption, viewing and restoring previously saved versions of files, scheduling backups, and incremental file backup). This device differs from others, however, because it lets you boot your Windows XP or Vista system from the ABSplus drive should the notebook’s hard drive conk out.

To test this feature, we turned off the Gateway P-7808u FX, removed the hard drive, connected the ABSplus, and powered on the notebook. We hit F10 to force the Gateway FX to boot from an external drive, and then saved the settings. Booting up from the ABSplus drive took 1 minute and 15 seconds, 19 seconds longer than it took to boot into the system using the normal hard drive. Once we arrived at the desktop, we had the option of booting into the PC normally or using Instant PC Recovery, which boots the system from the drive.

Operating within the backed-up computer environment presented no additional challenges; we surfed the Web, checked e-mail, and navigated Windows as we normally would using the internal hard drive. In fact, if it weren’t for the Instant PC Recovery desktop wallpaper and an on-screen dialog box that prompted us to either continue operating in Recovery mode or launch the Recovery process (which copies the backed-up information to the PC), we wouldn’t have known that we were using an external drive at all.

Fully copying the system back to the notebook took almost as long as copying it to the ABSplus: 1 hour and 21 minutes. Digging even deeper, BounceBack Ultimate let us simultaneously back up files to a Seagate FreeAgent Go drive, and synchronize folders (which allowed us to keep data synced between the Gateway and an Acer Aspire One netbook). Although the BounceBack Ultimate software allows users to make a complete backup of only one PC, the drive can be partitioned to save individual data files (such as documents and photos) for as many as three additional notebooks.

Performance
The 5,400-rpm ABSplus didn’t disappoint in terms of data transfer speeds. Copying a 4.97GB mixed-media folder (photos, music, videos, and documents) from our Gateway testbed to the portable drive took 5 minutes and 4 seconds—a rate of 16.7 MBps, which is on a par with the pocket drive average of 16.6 MBps.

When we transferred the same folder from the CMS ABSplus to the Gateway, the drive completed the task in just 3 minutes and 5 seconds, an impressive read rate of 27.5 MBps. That’s the fastest speed of all portable hard drives that we’ve tested, and it’s 18.4 MBps faster than the Seagate Replica. Unlike the Seagate Replica, you can drag individual files onto this device.

Other Models
CMS offers the ABSplus in a number of other capacities: 160GB, 5,400-rpm ($167); 160GB, 7,200-rpm ($193); 320GB, 5,400-rpm ($193), and 500GB, 5,400-rpm ($200).

Value
When you think about how much you’re paying per gigabyte for the $180, 250GB ABSplus, it’s certainly more expensive than other more portable external drives. The 500GB Seagate Replica, for example, costs just $20 more, but has double the capacity. What you’re paying for with the ABSplus is its BounceBack Ultimate Backup software, which allows you to continue computing if the hard drive goes kaput (the Replica only allows you to copy its content to a fresh drive). If you’d like to use your own drive, the BounceBack Ultimate software can be purchased separately, starting at $89.

Verdict
External storage devices such as the Seagate Replica excel at keeping your data backed up in case of hard drive failure, but very few allow you to actually stay productive should that unfortunate event occur. It’s in those moments that the CMS ABSplus proves its worth, particularly to the businessperson who might suffer revenue loss during downtime. It’s remarkably simple to boot directly from the drive, as well as access and restore your operating system, settings, and data, which makes it truly disasterproof storage. Our one recommendation is that you spend the extra $20 to double your capacity from 250GB to 500GB.

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.