beta @ amanzi

In part 1 of my Windows OneCare Live review, I looked at the initial installation of the software and the anti-virus protection. This part of the review will go through the backup/restore features – I’ll leave the performance tune-up review until part 3.

Let’s look at the backup first – Windows has always been lacking an easy to use backup tool and OneCare hopes to change this. The tool is extremely easy to use and intuitive but does lack a very key feature that will hinder any attempts for a quick and easy restore!

Stepping through the backup wizard is very easy, and the first question you’re required to answer is whether you want to backup to an external hard drive or to CD/DVD writer. I was running the tests from within VMware and didn’t have an external hard drive available so I opted to back-up to CD.

The next step is to select the files you want to backup and OneCare has done a great job of making this easy by categorising file extensions in easy to distinguish groups, like music, pictures, documents and even financial (Quicken/Money) files. The help files has an extensive list of all the extensions that are included in each group. You can select as many of the groups as you choose and then on the next step can add additional files and folders. For my first backup, I selected just the default sets and was presented with the summary of what I was about to backup.

The most impressive feature that I found while using OneCare is it’s ability to easily backup to CD-RWs. The first CD-RW already contained data and I was told that the disc couldn’t be used. I needed to erase the disc first before using it, which makes sense, and then I could continue with the backup in OneCare.

The backup completes seamlessly and you’re presented with a nice report at the end showing all the files that have been backed up. Interestingly, if you look at the contents of the CD, you’ll notice an “autorun.inf” file in the root of the CD – we’ll get to this in a bit.

I wanted to see if I could add an additional backup to the set on the CD-RW, so I ran through the backup wizard again adding some more files and was prompted to insert the same disc again. This worked perfectly, and I’m extremely impressed with how easy it was!

So far, so good – let’s see how the restore process works. As I mentioned above, OneCare places an “autorun.inf” file in the root of the CD and as expected, when inserting the disk into the CD drive a OneCare Restore wizard pops up. I deleted the contents of the My Documents folder and stepped through the wizard with the aim of restoring it again.

The three options you’re presented with seem to make sense and I decided to go with the “Restore all missing files” option. This was as easy as it can get and at the end of the restore I was presented with a list of the files restored. All looked good until I examined the My Documents folder and found that the My Music folder was missing.

This seemed a bit odd, so I decided to run the restore again to try and figure out where the folder had gone to. After a bit of digging and going through the wizard I discovered what the problem was, and also discovered a major issue with the program. You can’t restore a folder with Windows OneCare Live! This also explains why the My Music folder was missing – it contained no files so OneCare had nothing to restore. As we can see in the screenshots, OneCare offers three options for restoring files:

1. Restore all missing files – very handy if you’ve had a corrupt disk or other hardware fault and you’re not sure what files you’ve lost.
2. Select files by file type – only really useful if you need to restore all pictures, or all Word documents (in fact I can’t see how this would be useful at all!)
3. Search for files to restore – very useful if you know what files you need to restore. This would probably be the most useful option for most people.

The choice missing from this list is the ability to restore a single folder or multiple folders – this would be useful if you’ve deleted a folder accidentally. If that deleted folder contained a mixture of file types and file names, it would be near-impossible to search and find the files needed to restore. This is a terrible omission on the part of the programmers and I hope they fix it before the final release.

That brings me to the end of part 2 (of 3) of my Windows OneCare Live review. The fact that you can’t restore a specific folder is a major problem for anyone faced with needing to restore files. Also, because the My Music folder was missing from the restore, it also disappeared from the start menu – this would be extremely confusing for a general computer user. Let’s hope that this is on the “to fix” list before Microsoft expect users to pay for this software.