UltraBac 5.5 for Win NT

If you are a network administrator, frequently pestered with
crashed machine calls, with loss of valuable data, this product could help you.
UltraBac is a back-up software capable of backing up data on to a variety of
backup media. This can then be restored, to the affected machines, in the event
of an operating system or application crash. It runs on Win NT and can backup
data from other NT servers, Win 9x machines, Novell NetWare servers, MS Exchange
servers, and SQL servers running on your network.

UltraBac uses custom-defined sets to relate to various PCs,
for which you need to take backups. The set description includes the path of the
files and folders to backup, the path where the backup is stored and a host of
other information including the kind of files to backup. The last setting lets
you backup, for instance only the files that have been modified. The information
is stored in reference files, which are text files with the extension .UB.

Backup can be taken on a tape drive, a local hard disk or a
network drive. You can also take the backup as an image on the local drive and
later burn it on to a CD for archiving. However, ‘File and Printer sharing’
needs to be turned on and the required contents (files or folders) need to be
shared on the client machine for the backup to take place. This isn’t always
feasible as the data becomes accessible to others as well. If you
password-protect the folders, then doing scheduled backups with the software is
possible.

UltraBac can be scheduled to take unattended backups as per
defined set of parameters. These include time intervals for the backups to be
updated, apart from the regular information about clients and backup
destination. So you can set the application to take backup of your critical
servers, say every six hours. Or you can set the software to backup only a set
of critical files every fifteen minutes. This ensures minimal loss of data,
especially useful when dealing with database servers.

Restoring data is quite an easy task. You just need the set
file and the location of the stored backup. Once entered, you can also select
specific files or folders that you want restored from the index of the backed up
data. However, if you change the machine name after a crash, the backup doesn’t
work.

The software also lets you create rescue disks for Win NT. So
in the event of a Win NT server crash, you can boot off the rescue disks and
recover the system. Once up, data can be restored from the backup stored on your
backup device. It also has an UltraCopy option, which lets you copy a backup to
another device. So you can initially take backups on local drives and later move
them to tape drives for archival.

Till recently, UltraBac had a reseller in Kochi. But as of
this writing, they have discontinued the dealership. You can get more details on
the price and purchase procedures at www.ultrabac.com.

Ashish Sharma with Sanjay Majumder