F-Secure Online Backup review

F-Secure’s Online Backup is rather expensive when you consider that your £50 account can only be used with a single computer. Storage is unlimited, but the way you use it is restricted and you can’t back up system files.

During installation you can create an automatic backup of the files F-Secure thinks are important and change various settings, such as upload throttling. If you opt for manual backup configuration, you’re presented with five categories: office, pictures and videos, music, email and important files. The first four determine what file types will be included in the backup. The “important files” tab lets you select the directories you want to back up.

You can browse a tree view of your hard disk to select folders, but we were irritated to find that long paths and directory names were often cut off and that there was no way of resizing the window. Configuring locations and file types to be backed up was clumsy and confusing. Regardless of what settings we chose, it was easy to miss the files we wanted to back up others that we didn’t need. Fortunately, in a rare display of clear design, F-Secure also adds an option to the Windows right-click menu that allows you to immediately back up any file or directory you select.

Another tab in the backup client allows you to restore files from any of these categories. By default, F-Secure will attempt to restore all your files when you press the Restore Now button, but will only overwrite file versions that are older those it has stored. Alternatively, you can overwrite everything. Restoration is simple enough, but once again it’s easier to restore large groups of files by type than it is to navigate through the complicated tree structure to recover a single file.

The Settings tab is a little sparse. You can reset the amount of bandwidth assigned to your backups, enable version history saving for office documents (to a maximum of five versions), select how long backups of deleted files will be retained (to a maximum of 45 days), and allow the program to see and back up hidden files.

With a clumsy interface and serious limitations on how you can use it, there’s little to justify its £50 price.