CES Day 1 - I Need Your Stories

Paragon Backup and Recovery

It's no secret that I'm looking for a replacement for Acronis TrueImage. Acronis continues to serve me well, but I can't recommend it as enthusiastically as I once did due to the feedback I've received from folks who've occasionally run into trouble. Most annoying are the reports of issues with Acronis customer support.

I met today with representatives of Paragon and it's possible that their product meets all my criteria: automated full and incremental backups, and individual file as well as bare-metal restore.

And, of course, they're claiming excellent customer service.

Not that they'd say anything else, and the person I was talking to was indeed a support engineer.

So, let's hear from you: if you've used a Paragon product - any product, not just backup - what's your experience been? Just leave a comment below.

Roboform 7

I'm a much more enthusiastic supporter of Roboform. I use it daily - perhaps hourly.

I honestly thought that Roboform 7 had been officially launched, since I upgraded a couple of weeks ago, but apparently it was a quiet "soft" launch. CES marks the beginning of a more aggressive promotion.

The big difference with Roboform 7 is the push to something called "Roboform Everywhere". For a fairly low annual subscription, you can place Roboform on as many devices as you like, and they all sync to your password store kept on Roboform's servers in "the cloud" (I dislike the term, but it's as accurate as any).

I've got a couple of outstanding questions after talking to the rep, but remain convinced that Roboform's a great solution to the problem of needing secure passwords that are hard to remember: let Roboform remember them for you.

I'm now using Roboform Everywhere on a couple of PCs as well as on my Android based phone. They told me that a version for the Mac is (finally) underway and in alpha testing right now.

Trend Micro

I was honest with the product manager: I disrecommend most security suites because they're typically the result of a good single product - usually an anti-virus or anti-spyware product - with second-rate add-on products (anti-spyware, anti-virus, firewall, gosh knows what else) that are either slow, of low quality, buggy or all three. It seems to be fairly common that those additions are there simply to allow boxes to be checked so that the product can be called a "security suite".

Trend Micro's Titanium has been rewritten from the ground up, I've been told; all the components. That's promising.

They also include a (fairly pricey, in my opinion) cloud (there's that word again) based backup, but for unlimited data - perhaps justifying the price. The selling point there is significantly better access to your backed up data from multiple devices. In a sense it's almost a beefed up version of DropBox, in reverse. Dropbox is a cross-machine synchronization tool that many people use for cloud-based backup - Trend Micro's product promises to be a cloud based backup tool that acts as a really good cross-machine and platform data access tool.

We'll see.

As always, I'm curious what your experiences with these tools or their predecessors has been, and in all cases what your experience with the company's customer support has been.

I'm finding that the later can be a deal breaker when disaster happens.