REVIEW: IBE Group releases IBE Backup, the worst backup app EVER written for the PPC

IBE Group has been pretty busy churning out applications and games the last year. I’ve closely followed these and published some articles / reviews on some of them (see for example the IBE Mail and Star Invader reviews). I’ve, in general, found their games and applications useless in almost every respect.

Their latest title, IBE Backup (current, tested version: 1.1, build 1.0.0.1658), is, as you may have already guessed, a backup application.

Availability

The central homepage of IBE Group still doesn’t list the application; PocketGear does. There is a 3-day trial version of the application there; the commercial version costs a whopping $24.95, which is, in cases, considerably more expensive than all the other Pocket PC backup applications, except for Sprite Backup. Let’s see how it fares against them!

The user interface

The backup app tries to mimic the well-known Spb Backup very hard and, for a beginner, the reseblance may even cause him or her to actually believe he's using Spb Backup. Don’t know whether the IBE Group folks have bought the rights to do this (I seriously doubt it) or whether the Spb folks are actually happy to have such a bad title so similar to their quality backup product (I doubt this too).

Too bad the English of the application is much worse than that of Spb Backup – there are major typos and mistakes in the English in almost every dialog. And the underlying engine... let’s spend some time on scrutinizing the engine itself.

The underlying backup engine

In a word: useless. It’s, first, very slow to back up – it needs almost an order of magnitude more time to back up a Pocket PC than the (in cases, MUCH cheaper) alternatives.

It can’t back up password-protected Pocket PC’s in scheduled mode either, which isn’t a problem with most of the alternatives any more.

It has no desktop-side for example file / registry extractor utilities either, unlike several of the alternatives.

The problems don’t end at this, however. The worst is still coming:

Showstopper, REALLY BAD problems

The restoration of the Registry seems to be completely broken. Seemingly, it does restore everything (which you can also check out by exporting the restored Registry and diff’ing it with the original one); for some strange reason, however, the Pocket PC just doesn’t see the restored contents. This applies to almost everything depending on the Registry and you can check it yourself by, say, checking out whether the contents of

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ Microsoft\Shell\TaskSwitch]

(that is, the Start menu history – the list of last-started five applications) is visible to the Pocket PC. Or, if the backlight settings, [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ ControlPanel\BackLight], are visible (they aren’t either).

What is more, third-party registry keys under [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\] (for example, those of Mobile Stream’s USB Modem) aren’t even restored. Give it a try if interested: get the trial version of USB Modem, install it and start it to see the trial countdown indeed starts. Backup your device with say, Spb Backup (and, of course, IBE Backup) and, upon restoration, make sure you let the device’s clock stay at the factory default. After the Spb Backup restoration (because the Registry will still have the related info), USB Modem will (correctly) refuse to work, unlike after the restoration with IBE Backup.

And, of course, this is just one application (of the many) where the problematic Registry restoration causes problems - you will have a LOT of problems with other apps / games if you do restore with this app.

Benchmarks

In the following benchmark chart, I’ve listed the benchmark results of backup and restore operations on three of my test Pocket PC’s. I’ve compared the backup/restore times and the file sizes to the latest (dated 01/30/2007) Sunnysoft 4-series Backup Manager build and the latest, version 1.5.5 of Spb Backup. As can clearly be seen, while IBE Backup produces about 3% smaller backup files than Spb, its back-up time is more than five times larger.

App:Spb 1.5.5IBE 1.1, build 1.0.0.1658Sunnysoft 4.002.01301
Backup: Wizard (14.3M)2:00 (until reset); 6.25M11:20 ; 6.03Mn/t
PL720 (26.7M)4:10; 15.7M(couldn’t stand it being slow; 1% after 5 minutes)4:16; 16.9M + 60k EXE
X51v (114.6M)n/t~30 minutesn/t
Restore: Wizard2:011:10n/t
(n/t means „not tested“ )

Verdict

As with all the other (tested) IBE Group products, avoid this title like plague. It’s not even worth checking it out: it’s that bad.

Unfotunately, IBE Group seems to become the second Emcon Emsys Technologies on the Pocket PC. (For anyone that doesn’t know what they are famous for: they have been probably the worst game developers for the Pocket PC. Make a generic search for ‘Emcon’ here to see it for yourself. Start with, say, this thread.) That is, downright useless applications and games priced high.

Recommended links

In addition to my previous IBE Group reviews, the Pocket PC Backup Bible is highly recommended.