our review (continued)
Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and it looked to be just a blatant bug. I’m not sure how you would miss this during even a basic testing cycle. 
I went ahead and retyped my password and the password confirmation and then clicked on submit. I saw a message that said that my account was being created and then I was redirected to the sosonlinebackup.com front page. There were no instructions on what to do next and I was a bit confused. It looked like my trial account had been created correctly and so I was expecting some sort of download page to start the client download. Finally, I looked at my email and realized that I had received an email from SOS and that the next steps were detailed in the email. In the email it has a link for downloading the client and some marketing fluff —– “SOS Online Backup is PC Magazine’s Editors' Choice backup tool, and is the Wall Street Journal’s pick of online backup services.” I know that SOS has received several awards over the years, but at this point in the setup process I was a little dubious. It’s hard to believe that during a trial setup that they would have two big misses before starting the download. I was sitting there wondering what to do for quite awhile before I thought about checking my email—-how hard would it be to redirect to an instruction page after clicking the submit button.
I clicked on the link in my email and was directed to a download website. I downloaded the install for the client, which was about 16.5MB and then started the install process. The install process was very typical and completed with no issues. After the install completed, there was no indication of what to do next. Every other solution that I’ve reviewed has automatically started the client after the installation completed. I started to look around and found that an icon was placed on my desktop for SOS so I started that and it came up with a login prompt. 
I then logged in and the SOS client came up. I’m still bugged that there were no instructions after the client install—-they need to help the user a little more. It really feels like an IT application parading as a mainstream home user solution.
The client app starts up with four big buttons surrounding the picture of a laptop. The two top buttons are for online backup and restore and the two bottom buttons are for local backup and restore. Our focus is online backup, so we won’t be looking at the local backup options. There is a place for local backup and if you have a need for both local and online backup then SOS may be what you’re looking for. This initial view appears to be somewhat new since you can pick a “classic view” from the advanced button. I started my sojourn with SOS by clicking on the “Backup Online” button (top left) which started me through a wizard configuration process. 
The first step was to pick the files that I wanted to backup. I tried to select the “Documents” quick pick, but it picked “My Documents” and media files (pictures, music, videos) which was more than the trial would allow me. Even though it took me a minute to choose just the folders and files that I wanted it appeared that SOS was trying to pick the most likely items that users would want to backup without searching through all of their folders. After I picked my folders and files (about 250MB) I was then asked to setup my schedule for backup. I just accepted the default which was once a day. Even though they had defaults set for me I didn’t need to walk through this step. Too much information for the average user. Please, just make sure that my files get backed up. For the users that are control freaks allow them to change the settings, but don’t force the rest of us to see every configuration that is possible. There were several more screens before I was finished. Finally, it started to backup everything, although I did have a choice whether I wanted to start right now or let the scheduler start later. 
During the backup process there’s a feedback dialog that shows you the files that are being backed up and allows you to pause the process if needed. The backup process seems to be fairly intelligent and would pause while I was working on my computer and then start backing up again once the computer went idle. It did take a long time and instead of throttling back it appeared to completely pause. If I were backing up a lot of data I would just leave my computer on for several nights to get the initial backup completed. They do have a way to seed the initial backup by sending your files on DVD and then they would do incremental backups from that. I think every solution that I’ve tried so far has been faster than SOS.
SOS has something they call “classic view” which you can get to from the advanced button on the main client screen. 
Their classic view is very similar to many other backup solution clients. There’s a storage view that contains a hierarchical view of the folders and files in your current backup-set and you can right click to start a recovery. If multiple versions exist you can select which version you want. I tested this option on one file and a dialog popped up with a default location selected and a way to pick a different recovery location if desired. I chose to recover to c:\temp and keep the path in place. It worked just fine and recovered the single file in a matter of seconds. From the classic view there is another tab that allows you to change which files and folders that you want backed-up as well as many other configuration options. The classic view is fairly busy and looks like something you would see from the 1990s. One other complaint is that once my backup was completed I went to look at the results in the classic view and it told me that no files had been backed up. I decided to leave it overnight and make sure that there was enough time for SOS to update everything on their end. The next day it was still in the same state—-reporting no files backed-up. I looked around and saw a refresh button on the right side and clicked on that and then the storage view showed my files. It still showed in the status area that used space was 0MB. I then shut down the console and restarted it and then the used space updated to the proper reading. Once again it ended up working, but it was confusing to me, the end user.
I decided to test recovery from the main client screen by clicking the the big top right button called “Recover Online”. It took me through a wizard process that was just plain confusing, but after muddling through it I was able to start the recovery of all of my files. 
The recovery status dialog was kind of strange with the red status bar, but the process worked and the files recovered correctly.
The last thing that I looked at was the web interface. This was a breath of fresh air compared to the client. The web interface was fairly straightforward and surprisingly clean. 
I was able to browse all of my files quickly and easily and recover either entire folders or single files. I tested it and it worked great. I was also able to share an entire folder or single files. I just had to give the name and email address of who I wanted to share it with. The sharing was somewhat rudimentary, but it did work. The web piece of SOS is by far the cleanest part of their solution.
Overall, I wasn’t that impressed with SOS. Most of their issues are cosmetic and the solution did backup my files and I was able to restore, but I found myself scratching my head on several occasions and wondering if someone from SOS had ever tried the same test that I had. SOS feels like an enterprise solution from the 90s with some slapped on wizard configurations to try and throw together an online backup solution for home users. Top that off with an inflated pricing model and you get a rather disappointing experience.