Hello
I have never written to a
computer magazine before, or created a blog, but I feel the need
to do so now, in hopes of making the users of a certain popular
program aware of some problems that could adversely affect their
important data. I apologize in advance because I fear this letter
will be a lengthy one, but I want to be sure that I include all
the facts in hopes you will take me seriously, and I hope you
will bear with me.
The program is NTI Shadow 3
for Windows, a wildly popular program that guarantees to provide
secure hands-free backup of their important data. The first
problem – when using the program to back up photos from one
location to another (in my case from one hard drive to another),
the program takes MUCH longer to accomplish the backup than the
makers of the program would have you believe. I’m not
talking about the initial backup, done when you first create the
backup job with Shadow, that seems to work ok (well, not really,
it seems to arbitrarily not copy some photos when backing up a
fair number of them (in my case about 125,000, for the most part
ordinary JPG, with a few BITMAP and PNG), but that is the second
problem I will discuss). The problem comes into play when you
make changes to the source file, such as adding photos.
While Windows does this at it’s usual fantastic speed,
Shadow takes about 1 second per photo to do this (an eternity in
computer time, and it’s been my experience that it does
slow things down while it’s doing this). As an
example I just added 471 jpg photos to the source folder, which
of course took virtually no time at all. Shadow, however,
took over 8 minutes to copy these same photos to the backup
folder. As a more extreme example, several days ago I added
approximately 13,000 photos to the source file, which took the
normal amount of time for such a task. Shadow, however,
took nearly 4 hours to complete it’s backup of the new
photos. While Shadow does eventually accomplish it’s
backup duties, the problem is this – unless the user is
aware that the backup is laboriously taking place in the
background, there are any number of things he could do while this
was going on that could adversely affect the process, not the
least of which is turning off the computer, defragmenting the
drive, whatever. The only way he would know the process is
taking so long is if he happens to check the option box during
the setup of the backup job that allows you to actually see the
progress of the backup in a small window. This is a rather
obscure option, and even if he does choose it, if he happens to
have another window open on his desktop (and who doesn’t?)
the progress window is completely hidden, without the option to
keep it on top or to shrink it to a progress indicator in the
task bar. The only other way he would know this was going on is
if he happened to notice that his hard drive activity light was
faintly flashing, and even then he might not associate this with
the backup job being accomplished because spurious hard drive
activity is a pretty much a given on most systems
If all it was
doing was duplicating the changes onto the backup drive, it
should (in my humble opinion) take only as long as the initial
changes, very little time indeed. The only reason I can
think of for it to take so long is because of the process it
needs to go through to confirm that a change has indeed been made
before it does it’s thing.
The other problem, and this
is a major one for a program of this nature, is that when I did
the initial backup of my data (again, consisting mainly of a fair
number of photos), it routinely failed to backup some of them,
usually somewhere between one and two hundred of them. And
never the same ones, as I tested this a number of times.
The photos in question (which took a lot of work to track down),
were ordinary JPG photos, which I had no problem copying
manually. A couple of hundred photos out of nearly 125,000 may
not seem like a lot, unless you consider that Murphy’s Law
dictates that a least some of those photos are irreplaceable,
one-of-a-kind the-opportunity-will-never-present-itself-again
photos. And unless you constantly check the backup numbers
against the source file numbers (which should not be necessary if
the program can be trusted to do it’s job as advertised),
you will never know that some of your photos (or songs, or
videos, whatever) are not going to be restored if (or more
accurately when) the occasion does arise that you need to recover
from a disaster. And, of course, even if you do check the
numbers, discovering which items are missing can be a daunting,
frustrating task, so time-consuming that I’ve discovered
that it is actually easier to do the backups on my own.
Admittedly those that choose
to setup the program to do their backups at a certain time of the
day (or more likely at night) might not mind the unreasonable
times involved, but I for one chose the program because of
it’s unique ability to provide real-time on-the-fly
backups.
Now, just so you can judge
whether or not something on my end could be the cause of this
problem, let me explain a few things --
My system is fairly typical,
nothing exotic or unusual – Windows XP Pro with all the
updates, 2.6 Pentium 4 processor, 2 gigs ram running in dual
mode, three 320GB hard drives, the first for the operating system
and programs, the second (drive D) for all of my photos, music,
videos, etc (but mainly for photos), and the third (drive E) for
backup. Drives D and E are SATA, non-raid. Like
any security-conscious user nowdays, I use several anti-virus and
anti-spyware programs (all mainline programs, nothing unusual),
and go to great pains to make sure my system is up to date and in
top shape. Please know that even though I have been
building and using computers since I retired from the Air Force
about ten years ago, I make no claims to being any kind of
computer expert.
As far as the possibility
that the problem might lie in my particular installation of their
program, I uninstalled and reinstalled it several times, and last
week I reformatted my OS hard drive (using a three-pass random
generator wipe, not for the purpose of testing Shadow, it’s
just something I routinely do about three times a year to clean
out the misc program bits and pieces and start from a clean
slate), and, before installing any other program (to avoid any
possibility that some other program might be interfering with
their program), I reinstalled NTI Shadow and did more tests, with
the same results. To further verify the problem, I also
installed it on a second computer, same results, and then had two
friends install Shadow and run similar tests, with exactly the
same results.
I attempted to make NTI
aware of these problems, using both their “technical
support” and their forums. Their forum is a bit of a
joke, they either delete the posts that don’t suit their
purposes or leave them “unmoderated”, so that only I
can see them. I was attempting to at least get them to
issue a warning to users of the program of a potential problem so
that they could take appropriate steps to ensure their important
data is indeed being safeguarded. Of course they
ignored that because that would be an admission that their
“miracle” program might be flawed in some way.
At no point would they admit the existence of a problem, saying
only that they “are working on it”. At the same
time, and more importantly, they never once denied that the
problems do exist. Now they no longer respond to my queries
regarding the progress of their testing at all, possibly hoping
that I will just go away.
At one point they actually
suggested that I shut down any programs that might be running in
the background, which I thought was rather ridiculous for a
program that is supposed to run automatically and unobtrusively
in the background anytime you turn on and use your computer, and
nowdays who doesn’t have programs running in the
background, antivirus and antispyware programs at a minimum.
In a time when it is accepted
that the necessity for preparing for the inevitable disaster has
made regular backups of important and irreplaceable data an
all-important part of computer user’s daily life, this
program has become a very popular one, and lately it seems that
more and more hardware manufacturers are including Shadow as part
of their products (Toshiba, NEC and FreeCom to name a few).
I was very excited when I
heard about Shadow, it seemed like exactly the program I had been
searching for. I read a lot of glowing reviews before
deciding on it, and after my experience I can only assume that it
was not tested extensively, using the large numbers of files I
have attempted to use it for, apparently by only making
relatively small changes, additions or deletions to data, small
enough that the time involved was not noticeable, and small
enough that the failure to completely back up the data did not
come into play.
I sincerely hope NTI can fix these problems. At the
very least I hope they will have the integrity to issue a warning
to the many users of their program.
