Clickfree Easy Backup Review

The unit arrived in a standard mailing box, and was not damaged upon delivery, despite a lack of bubble wrap or other impact protection. There was a small ding on the plastic packaging, however it was too slight to damage the unit itself.

The unit's packaging was straightforward and easy to open, and the unit itself has what seems like a durable scratch free finish. Contents included the unit, USB cable, quick start guide, trouble shooting tips, and a copy of the EULA.

The USB cord has a splitter, apparently to provide the unit with additional USB based power if needed. Our laptop is running on XP, service pack two, and it has USB-2 ports. Once the unit was plugged into the PC's USB, it powered up immediately. After approximately one minute, the Clickfree Automatic Backup window popped up, and the unit began to scan the hard drive as it searched for files. The unit runs virtually noiselessly, and one has to hold it to feel its slight vibration.

After approximately three minutes of scanning our 200Gig hard drive (150 Gig used), the unit began the back up process. We were running Excel, Word and Firefox simultaneously, and those applications suffered no performance issues during the scanning or backup process.

During the backup, we scanned the windows task manager for unusual processes, and when we terminated 'officeguardian.exe', the clickfree window closed and the backup process ceased. Once the unit was plugged in again, the unit began to search from the beginning. This time, our ZoneAlarm firewall detected Officeguardian's attempt to access the internet, and we denied it to see how the unit would respond. The backup process seemed unaffected by the denial. During the backup, another process called starterofficeguardian.exe was running.

Started 8.30, finshed by 5.30 15230 files backed up. 112 gigs. File summary and interface look cool, you can drill down to the files by type.

It saves raw files. DOESN’T SAVE ‘SIDECAR’ FILES,IE XMP FILES) WHICH EDIT THE ORIGINAL RAW IMAGE. SAVES adobe photoshop images, in separate folder because it assigns them as ‘artwork and designs’ instead of pictures. The search function doesn’t not show the file type when it finds a file, you have to deduce the file type by filtering your search by each file type in turn.

When you browse the files however, the oiginal file location is preserved, so the photshop images and jpegs.RAW images are in the same location.