This post and others like it relate back to an introductory post that explains the point. This is an edited variant of something I wrote in 2007, in this case relating my experience with backup and compression software. In no particular order, the list as best I can remember…
Microsoft Backup
ARCserve
Retrospect
Veritas Backup Exec
Stomp PC Backup
PKZip
Winzip
NERO Burning ROM
Adaptec/Roxio
Stacker
Stomp and my first look at Retrospect were help with evaluations or troubleshooting by a former partner, for someone he had as a personal client without putting them through the business. The big client used ARCserve from way back, originally under Novell. Later they switched to Veritas backup Exec, which I liked even better and which, at least at the time, had a reputation as best of its kind. The people we outsourced their upgrade to in fall of 2006 completely ignored the presence of the infinitely superior Backup Exec, replacing it with Retrospect, now an EMC product, which gave me some experience fighting with it and trying to puzzle out how anybody could have created such an obscure maze of unusability.
I used to be able to make PKZip dance and sing, and even resisted Winzip for a while. Eventually I bought five Winzip licenses to reward them for being so good and useful. I don’t recall ever using a Winzip competitor, but I did do a VB support call once with a guy who told me his product competed with them.
NERO was my favorite CD burning software. I found it entertaining when Microsoft adopted Roxio as the native software for XP and made sure NERO as packaged with CD burners wouldn’t work. The archiving and CD burning computer at the big client had Adaptec software, which worked just fine. That machine had a fancy SCSI Plextor burner in it.
Putting Stacker into this list is a bit of a stretch, but I did use it heavily in its heyday, and was entertained by the whole Doublespace/Drivespace thing. I never used Stacker or anything similar again after it killed my original 60 MB MFM drive, which was cannibalized out of my Packard-Bell 286 to build my original 386.
Next up, miscellaneous software.