FarStone TotalRecovery Pro 11

Overview

TotalRecovery Pro is a fully-featured software that will help you backup your data in order to protect them from a potential virus or a catastrophic system failure, easily and effortlessly. The backups can include anything; from personal files like music and photos, to whole applications and their settings, or even the whole OS. They can be recovered later with just a single click, even on a different computer than the one they were created in.

Installation

The installation package is quite big, reaching 400MB. At first when you run it, the installer will extract the contents of the package and then will guide you through a series of steps. It is a straightforward process and not demanding at all. Due to the size of the program, it will take a few minutes for the installation to finish.

If you have Windows XP, Vista or 7, 32 or 64-bit versions, then you won’t have any problem using TotalRecovery. As of v9.0, Windows 8 is supported too.

Interface

The program is rich in features and options, all found in the main window and the menu bar. The main screen has shortcuts to creating or restoring Backups and also displays a log with all recent backup jobs. The navigator on the left has a list with the main features (Backup, Restore, Task List and View Logs) which you can use to navigate faster to those features.

Pros

You can backup the entire disk, a partition or just specific files and folders. In addition to that, you can schedule the backup to happen when it best suits you, even if you’re away at that time. Restoring the backups is easy as well, just select a previous job or browse for an image file and then recover it. As for cloning, it’s possible too. You can clone a whole drive or a specific partition.

You can also create a bootable image on a CD/DVD or USB flash disk, in case you can’t even boot Windows for whatever reason (hardware failure, missing system files etc.). This is a true life saver.

After successfully creating a backup, you can keep it updated. Just schedule automatic incremental updates (or do it manually if you wish) and relax. If you choose to create an incremental backup but a full backup isn’t found, then a full backup will be created instead. Another option is to create a differential backup, which copies only the files modified since the previous full backup.

There are three compression types for the backups: None, Low, High. The higher the compression level, the more time it will take to finish the job.

If you would like to be informed of the backup tasks, you can set TotalRecovery to dispatch reports to a specified email address.

The program can automatically upload the created backup to an FTP server. All you need to do is check “Offsite copy” in the Advanced settings and enter the technical details of your FTP server.

The Image Mount option gives users the ability to preview the contents of an image, a useful feature for those who don’t want to use additional software to do that.

Cons

There have been some bug reports by users including that you don't always get warning messages when problems are encountered. However, we haven’t experienced anything like that during our tests.

Alternatives

Many backup software exist, and it’s up to you to decide which one to use. But the ones we recommend are Acronis True Image (paid), NovaBACKUP (paid), DT Utilities PC Backup (paid) and Genie Backup Manager Pro (paid). They all have an extended list of features, don’t require special skills or knowledge to use, are perfectly stable and they are affordable as well.

Conclusion

If you came across this product, use it. Test it out yourself to see if it meets your standards; chances are that it does.