NTI Shadow 5 for Windows [On Sale!] Newest edition of "Editor's Choice" Award-winning backup software. Continuous Backup. Email Backup. File Synchronization.

Just DL'd Shadow 5. It may do a good job of backing up--I don't know yet--but just the setup routine, and the parent company itself, raise some serious doubts about using their product.Since I'm unaware of any other auto-backup programs, I've still been using DataKeeper from Power Quest, but it's iffy on XP (needs baby-sitting to make sure the auto backups really work correctly), and I doubt it's any better under Win 7 (the new computer I'm building is Win 7 64 bit). Can't blame Power Quest, though, as they went out of business a few years back, and so DataKeeper was never revised for XP. I absolutely loved it on Win 2K, however...every time I created a new file, DataKeeper backed it up automatically, on the fly.But NTI came along with Shadow 5, which seems to do much the same thing as DataKeeper, so I DL'd it today, wanting to get the backup in Shadow 5's format before transferring the backup and data drives to the new machine.The first thing one notices in trying to set up Shadow 5 is that if you have questions, there is no manual (either hard copy or even pdf) to give you an overall view of the program. The auto setup that start initially on its own wanted to back up to an 8MB pin drive, so I found a box for "Advanced" setup, which did allow me to individually select my choice of drives to back up to, and folders to back up. When I got to step two, there was a list of drives in a window, but not one letter of text explaining what to do with that screen. I had been keeping my eye out for a place to actually select my target drive, and suspected this screen might have something to do with that, but I sure wasn't going to select a drive on a whim, click "next" and see what happened without a bit more information.So I had to call NTI.(No 800 numbers here, boys and girls, it's a toll call to California for this cheap company if you want to actually discuss the issue.) Or, you could use their message screen to get email help. But it's a bit of a drawback that the text window you type in doesn't scroll when you run out of space, it just keeps typing without scrolling down. So you have to manually scroll down after each line you type if you want to see what you're doing. (No, you can't scroll down several lines in advance, just one line at a time after the cursor drops to start placing type on the next line below the border!)Anyway, the tech told me on the phone that the screen I was on (screen 2)tells me at the top to select the drive from the list for my target drive. Since it did no such thing, she brought it up on her screen to see for herself, and was surprised to see that indeed, there were no instructions for anything on that page.So, to recap so far, they left out a crucial bit of information at step two, and the tech obviously hadn't even seen the page to know about this issue. They can't design a usable email tech support window that scrolls normally. Tech support isn't even familiar with the program they're supporting. No toll-free tech support calls. Are you starting to get a good picture of NTI's competence and attitude toward its customers so far? What if they check their program code as closely as they check the user interface? (Oops! Sorry you lost all your data--we forgot a line of code!)I wish there were other auto-backup programs around, but I don't know of any. If there were, I'd gladly take a loss on my $40 to get away from NTI as quickly as I could.Ron Hildebrand