Dear Storagecraft,

Shadowprotect Desktop for all intents and purposes is the home user edition, but you are pricing it outside the market!

Not only that, but your multi user home editions, which are now being embraced more and more as corporate software companies realise that Mr. Home User and his family have more than one PC\Laptop\Netbook on their home network, need their pricing re-evaluated too!

Your product, Shadowprotect, is gaining a reputation for being one of the best, if not THE  best Software Back Up solution out there. But that is no justification for overinflated pricing!

Quick examples of competing products based on pricing as of 8th February 2010:

Shadowprotect Desktop (1 user) + 1 year maintenance $95.95 !!!!!

Shadowprotect Desktop (3 user) + 1 year maintenance $229.99 !!!!!!!!!!!!

Acronis True Image Home 2010 (1 user) $59.49

O&O Disk Image 5 Professional (3 user) $93.44

Macrium Reflect Full (4 user) $79.98

Paragon Drive Back Up 10 Professional (1 user) $49.95

Norton Ghost 15.0 (1 user) $69.99

note; all prices exclude any special offers

Of course there are more products out there, I have included these ones because they seem to be the more well known, paid for solutions. As you can see, Storagecraft need to seriously re-evaluate their pricing strategy to the home market!

Regards,

craigm

Craigm

Yeah, this has come up periodically, and I think all of use would like to get things for less, but in this particular situation, I think you do get what you pay for. If you search for the posts by some of the senior engineers at StorageCraft, together with the website itself, you'll see that StorageCraft is primarily focused on the enterprise market. The features built into the products, in addition to the slightly terse documentation, are targeted more towards the corporate IT staff than home users. If you look at the features in ShadowProtect and compare it to the other products, you'll see there are many features that are must-haves for IT staff but not that compelling for 'home users'.

So here are some of the differences:

1. Reliable backups and restores
   Most ShadowProtect are using ShadowProtect because they have had nightmare experiences with the other products you mention. Everything from failed restores, corrupt backups, failed schedules, and even recovery CD that you either have to create yourself or which can't even see the HDDs in your computer! Streaming a load of data to a file and calling it a backup is the easy thing. What is difficult, is making sure you have something worth restoring, and, that you can actually restore it.
2. Very fast full and incremental backups
   This may not be important for a home user who makes a full backup once in a blue moon. For the corporate market, where a workstation needs to be backed up frequently with very little impact on the users, this feature is essential. In fact, for some companies, it may even be a legal requirement. For a corporate user, paying a few extra dollars for this is nothing compared to the potential cost of not having this.
3. Pre-built, reliable, flexible Recovery Environment
   ShadowProtect does not use a Linux-based, hand-crafted recovery environment, but a fully licensed Windows PE. If you use the Vista-based environment you can even load new drivers after booting the CD. Again, this may not appear to be critical for the 'home user', but it is for the corporate market and anyone using multiple computers.
4. Recovery Environment Tools
   ShadowProtect includes a range of tools on the Recovery Environment CD to help with restores and computers with boot problems. The Boot Configuration Utility can patch and repair boot configuration data (BCD/boot.ini), sector boot codes and other boot files. That avoids the need to carry around a Windows install disk or using other boot update/repair tools (some of which you need to pay for).
5. Support for restore to new hardware (HIR)
   This is a must have for most enterprises as it helps provide one piece of a DR solution. It is also essential for 'home users' who have a laptop - mainly because fixing a laptop motherboard often costs more than a new laptop. And if you get a new laptop, it is unlikely that you will be able to easily restore any of your backup images to that new hardware. You may have been making years worth of backups but without HIR, you'd be stuck with just mounting the backups and copying files over manually.  Axxxnis does have a product that does this, but last time I checked it cost $115. In other words it was $20 more than ShadowProtect.
6. Built in management console
   ShadowProtect includes a management console that lets a member of IT manage the backup agents on multiple machines. Many of the products either do not include this, or you need to pay extra for it. Again, a 'home user' may or may not find this useful, but for the coporporate market, it is an essential feature.
7. Incremental backup management + Continuous Incremental backups
   Most of the backup products you list do not support, and do not have a track record, in Continuous Incremental backups. Using this feature allows a ompany to create a single full backup and then run very fast, very small incremental backups for months. ShadowProtect also includes ImageManager which allows you to manage, verify and collapse those files. That makes it possible to stream incremental backups offsite (e.g. as part of a DR plan) and have ImageManager run both locally and remotely to collapse and manage the incremental files. Compared to some of the other potential DR options, this is a big time/cost saver. Again, not a feature that many 'home users' exploit, but there are many people with a little more experience that do use this feature. 
8. Support for Virtualization
   VMware includes support for importing a ShadowProtect backup image into a virtual machine. If you are running a company, then this provides a relatively simple and cheaper part of a DR solution. You cannot do this with most of the products above. In fact, ShadowProtect's HIR feature allows you to restore a ShadowProtect backup to ANY virtual machine, including those from VMware, MIcrosoft, Sun etc. If your company sales rep or CEO needs access to programs on a failed laptop or PC, this provides a quick, cheap and reliable solution to that problem. Although many 'home users' may not need this feature - they may not even know what it is - it is useful for many people, especially software developers. If you spend a couple of days installing and configuring a host of applications, you want to avoid going through that again if PC/lpatop fails.
9. Good support
   StorageCraft is focused on one product and many of the senior engineers - and even the CTO - will often post answers on the forum. The largest poster on the forum is one of the senior principle engineers. And they do read the forum posts and take a keen interest in all ther feedback. They are also much more honest and straightforward if they make a mistake, and do their best to get a quick fix out. Compare that to some of the canned responses from some of the other companies, often with little technical content and often from a person focused more on 'closing' the issue than providing a good answer. Oh, and they speak English.

I'll leave you with some details of the problems I've had personally with some of the main products you list above, and why I now use ShadowProtect:

One of the companies provides a recovery CD that failed to see my SATA HDDs. I provided details to their support and eventually exchanged emails with a support 'engineer'. After providing details of the motherboard, chipset and running various LInux commands and sending him the files, he suggested it might be a driver issue. Way to go Sherlock. I then had to find, download, unpack and send the driver direct to him. When I asked why he didn't download the file himself, he said he 'sometimes has problems downloading files'? After nearly 3 weeks, he sent me a custom CD. The CD booted and recognized the drives.......but could no longer recognize the network or any USB devices. I ended up rebuilding my machine.

Prior to that, I had consistantly backed up my system with another product (think yellow). I had a huge number of backups, all of which verified ok. When I can to restore one of the images, all of them were corrupt. I assumed my filesystem was corrupt, and not the backup application. To check I install the backup application on a new machine, made a full backup and ran a full restore. Guess what - even that was corrupt.

Oh, and one other thing. Some companies seem to include major bug fixes only into new releases. You are then forced to buy a new release just to get a fix to that problem. More often than not, that new release contains new bugs. I have 3 releases from one of the companies you mention - a total of about $150 worth - and you could probably build a half-decent product if you combined all the bits that work. However, each one on its own is completely useless.

Ultimately, a user needs to test a product before buying it and with a backup product that means you have to test the restore. And how much you pay for a product depends on how much you value the data on your machine, and how much you value your time. However, no matter how low the price, you are still going to get people who want it for less. In my mind, buying one of the other products is like putting a cheap set of retreads on a brand new Mercedes. Sure you'll save some money, but why would you?

Regards

FT

Craigm, your cost analysis focuses upon the initial purchase price and does not consider the ongoing cost.  For example, with Norton Ghost, each new version must be purchased separately (sometimes with a discount for existing customers); whereas, for users of ShadowProtect Desktop with a maintenance agreement, all upgrades are free.  Over a 2+ year timeframe, do the math and I think you’ll see that in most cases ShadowProtect Desktop is by far the better long-term value.

Craigm, I have to agree with all of the comments above. I've use products from Acronis, Norton, NTI, EMC, Nova, Colorado, and others. All of them have failed, either during a backup or a restore. While I have had serious issues with SPD, I have received continuous, active, support and the problems have been resolved.

For instance, not one of the Linux-based environments have supported new name-branded PCs I've had until the hardware platform was effectively out of date. What use is that? Same goes for the Acronis BartPE version. So I use Acronis TI that I bought in a special on-line deal on their web site for around $25 a seat for the ancient hardware that mostly sits on the shelf in case we need an extra machine. I would not trust it with live data. The real killer for Acronis was that they change the backup file format periodically and the old formats are not guaranteed to be supported by the new software version (according to their documentation). Kind of makes archiving a bit pointless if you can't be sure you can read the archives in the future.

George

Dear CraigM,

In my humble opinion, StorageCraft's ShadowProtect Desktop solution is simply without peer.  Given its exceptional reliability, ease of use, and product support, StorageCraft's cost structure is exactly spot-on.

To put it quite bluntly, one cannot reasonably expect Mercedes quality, at a Pinto price point.

There is something to be said about peace of mind, and ShadowProtect delivers it in spades, my friend.

Most sincerely yours,

Bamm

Sorry, old chap.  Forgive me for recycling your Mercedes analogy.  Chalk it up to lazy thread perusal.  I really should've read your final paragraph.  Had I done so, I would have supplanted 'Mercedes' with 'Bentley', so as not to appear repetitive.

@ Craig

Honestly.  You won't find a better product out there.  Not sure what other backup products you've used in the past, but there's one in particular that's caused me nothing but headaches.  Without going in to too much detail, it basically torched my Windows XP MBR.  Ended up purchasing a nifty little app called BootMaster Partition Recovery to reverse the damage.  Anyway, the culprit software was published by a company, the name of which shall remain anonymous here, but suffice it to say that the box was school-bus yellow in color, and it featured a photo of a bespectacled 40-year-old-virgin-lookin' twonk whose name rhymes with "Dieter Morton".

In stark contrast, this godsend of a data protection solution that graces my machine today is absolutely bulletproof. Trust me – I thrashed the dog squeeze out of ShadowProtect before and after purchasing a license.  In my zeal, I exceeded the allowable number of discrete machine loads.  But after some initial, totally warranted scrutiny by StorageCraft, they graciously reactivated the product and now, running on my recently-home-built x58/i7 Windows 7 Ultimate PC, using ShadowProtect v3.5.0.3570, I couldn't be more pleased. As a matter of fact, within ten minutes of receiving my subscription renewal email from StorageCraft, I purchased it just about as fast as you can say "American Express Gold Card".

There may be other things in this world that keep me awake at night, but ShadowProtect certainly isn't one of 'em.

Bamm

BammBamm:

I purchased it just about as fast as you can say "American Express Gold Card".

You used Mr. Underhill's number, I hope. ;-)

prius:

BammBamm:

I purchased it just about as fast as you can say "American Express Gold Card".

You used Mr. Underhill's number, I hope. ;-)

Membership has its privileges…

BammBamm:

...using ShadowProtect v3.5.0.3570

Please download and install 3.5.1.  Everyone should.  It contains a critical fix for an problem that can (rarely) occur with incremental backups.  You don't need to uninstall 3.5.0 first.  Just download the 3.5.1 trial/eval installer (which is the only installer actually - it is the full installer) on top of your existing install.  Your activation will be preserved, as will your existing backup job(s).

I'll ask Doug to respond to your retention policy question as he's the one who wrote that code.  Oh, I just realized I won't be in the office tomorrow - hitting the slopes with my son.  Will tell Doug on Wednesday.

Downloaded the latest ISO (and ENU_Desktop_Setup_3.5.1.exe) on 2/16.  Burned the ISO, but neglected to update ShadowProtect, at the time.  D’OH!!

Took your advice, and SPD is now the latest & greatest version:

Have fun tomorrow. One o’ these days, I’d like to go out and chase after ski bunnies too.  I hear you guys have some decent powder out there.

Thanks, man. ~ Bamm