By Edward Mendelson ShadowProtect Desktop won't dazzle you with its looks or its feature list, but it makes itself indispensable through its speed, reliability, and single-minded attention to backing up and restoring your system and your files. Unlike rival products that look like the kind of Swiss Army Knife that can get you imprisoned for life if you bring it the airport, ShadowProtect Desktop is focused on creating and using disk images—files that contain a complete snapshot of a partition on your disk, which you can either use to restore your entire system in a single operation, or open in a window on your desktop—as if it were a real disk—so you can explore or copy individual files and folders.
After reviewing many rival products, I still use ShadowProtect for my regular backups. And I'll describe in a moment how I used it to solve some Windows problems that nothing else could solve. It's been our Editors' Choice ever since it appeared, and we haven't found any reason to change our opinion.
ShadowProtect Desktop 5 is a reduced version of StorageCraft's business and enterprise-level backup solutions, which include such high-level features such as cloud-based storage and network-wide backup control panels. Even the basic Desktop app is designed for efficiency more than for consumer-level friendliness, but any moderately knowledgeable consumer can manage it easily. All you need to know is some basic knowledge of how to navigate the Windows file system in a File/Open dialog box.
Getting Started
Here are the basics. Start up the app; make sure that the Wizards tab is showing in the main interface, click Backup, and follow the prompts to select a partition to backup and a location where you want to save the backup. Typically, you'll choose an external USB disk, but the destination-selection dialog lets you navigate to another system or storage device on your network and use that instead. If you're making backups for convenience instead of safety—for example, if you want quick access to older versions of your files—you can save the backup to another partition on your main hard disk, but do this only if you don't mind losing your backups and your originals if your main hard disk fails.
The next dialog lets you schedule your backup, and you may want to change the default setting, which makes a full backup every Sunday and then makes "incremental" backups (backups that save only files changed since the last full backup) once every hour on weekdays. The next option lets you encrypt your backups and click on an "Advanced" button for some crucial options that you probably shouldn't ignore.
The Advanced option that I use most is on the Retention tab in the Advanced dialog; this lets me tell the app to delete older backups after new ones are made; I typically save two full weekly backups, and let the program delete older ones, but you can save as many backups your storage location can hold. Then look over a summary page that reminds you of the options you've chosen, and click Finish to let the app do its job. You can close the main window, and let the app do its work in the background, so you don't have to think it about it again until you need it for a recovery.
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