Genie9 has been in the backup software business for a very long time, so it’s probably no surprise that it now has a lengthy list of products. Whether you’re looking for basic home protection, business, cloud, Android or even complete server backups, the company claims to have something which can help.

Genie Timeline Professional 2014 sits somewhere in the middle of this range. It looks like the home edition, is focused on ease of use, and only allows the creation of a single backup job. And yet it also supports encryption, has date-based scheduling, and can occasionally surprise you with some of its more advanced features (deduplication, junction point options, include and exclude filters with regular expression support).

While this release isn’t a major update, it does see some welcome additions. If you accidentally delete a backed-up file, for instance, there’s no longer any need to go searching the entire backup for it: the new Recycle Bin displays all your deleted files in one place, allowing you to restore them in a couple of clicks.

Timeline Professional 2014 also provides more ways to control your backup, better reports and a range of other tweaks (encryption for file names, better disaster recovery, TLS email notification support). It’s all then packaged in what Genie9 calls a “new and enhanced interface”, although existing users shouldn’t worry: as far as we can see, it’s not changed in any significant detail.

Creating a backup

After a hassle-free installation, launching Timeline Professional 2014 reveals a clean and simple Windows 8-like console. This organises the program’s key functions into three categories; “Restore”, “Manage Backup” and “Tools”. Hovering your mouse over any of these reveals three related links (“Start a new backup”, “Change backup drive” and “Modify data selections” for “Manage Backup”, say), and clicking a link finally launches that function.

The Setup Wizard walks you through the process of creating a backup.

We opted to create a new backup, and the Setup Wizard appeared. Again, it’s focused very much on ease of use, especially when selecting the files you’d like to back up. A Modern UI-type group of tiles represents various file and backup types: Email, Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Music, Bookmarks, and more, with a “Disaster Recovery” option to protect and restore Windows if it won’t start. Select whatever you like and Timeline Professional will back up all the files in that category.

If you prefer something a little more conventional, though, a “My Computer” pane provides a standard Explorer-type view where you can manually select whatever files and folders you’d like to protect.

Whatever you choose can be further customised with as many include and exclude filters as you need. You might tell Timeline Professional to ignore the contents of a particular folder, exclude *.tmp and *.old files, but include *.zip, say. The filters offer regular expression support for extra flexibility and precision.

Timeline Professional’s operations can be tweaked a little further at the Backup Options page; you can enable compression and 256-bit AES encryption with a click, while a new “Encrypt file names” option should help to obscure the names of any encrypted files, useful if they contain sensitive information in themselves.

There are one or two weaknesses here. In particular, the Email backup option still only supports Microsoft clients (Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail/ Live Mail). Still, in the main it’s quick and easy to set up, and most people will have a basic backup configured within a few minutes. What’s more, there are plenty of other options available if you need them.

Backup options

Once your backup has been defined, a click on the Settings link provides quick access to some important settings.

Backups can be scheduled to run automatically.

A simple scheduling tool supports various ways of launching your backups. You can run them at regular intervals (anything from 3 minutes to once a day); at a specific time, on particular days of the week, optionally closing down your PC afterwards; or you can enable Genie’s IntelliCDP, which essentially means the program decides the backup frequency itself, based on file type and size. It’s not the best scheduling tool we’ve ever seen, but it’s probably good enough.

File retention options allow you to decide how your archived files will be managed. You might have the program delete file versions after a certain number of days, or you set an overall limit for the backup size. Genie Auto Purge would then automatically delete the oldest version of the same file (keeping as many others as it can), but this can now be disabled, which means you’re able to keep every version of every file.

There are a few other tweaks available. The program will by default back up only one copy of duplicate files, for example, but you can turn this off if you like. There’s a new option to prevent Genie Timeline following junction points, if you can think of a good reason to use it.

More usefully, you can tell the program to marginally delay its start, helping to improve your boot performance. And all this can be monitored via weekly email notifications (new this time is support for TLS encryption when using your own server), or with Genie Timeline’s own iOS mobile app.

Again, none of this is going to amaze you, but the settings do provide some useful ways to customise your backup, and they’re easy to understand and use.

Day-to-day management

With your backup job set up and configured, in theory there’s nothing else for you to do. You can just get on with your normal PC tasks, and Genie Timeline will jump into action at whatever times you’ve specified, copying new or changed files to their destination.

If you need to manage or control your backup job, though, you might start by right-clicking Timeline’s system tray icon. The context menu includes options to run your backup immediately, or pause and resume the current backup.

A new Backup Score acts as a marketing tool for Genie9’s cloud backup service

Opening the console displays a basic summary of your current backup status (when the last backup was run, when the next one if due, how many items are still to be protected).

New this time is an almost entirely pointless “Backup Score”. Genie9 says this is intended to be “an indication of your backup health”: have you set up your backup, has it run in the last 24 hours, and so on. But you can’t score full marks until you install Genie9’s own cloud backup tool, so it seems to us that this is really just a marketing tool, little more than an advertising banner. We could live with that in freeware, but it doesn’t belong in a commercial product.

More usefully, you can choose Timeline’s operating mode. The default, Smart Mode, tries to back up data when your PC isn’t too busy; backups will take longer, but they’ll have less effect on your PC. But switch to Turbo Mode and backup performance becomes the priority; Timeline should now run more quickly, at the expense of everything else.

We say “should”, because performance in our tests was extremely variable. Sometimes Turbo Mode seemed fast, but then it would regularly pause, for no apparent reason at all. If you’re testing the program for speed, we’d recommend running a large backup, several times, to get a realistic idea of what you can achieve.

Restore

There are many ways to restore files from your Timeline backup. If you need to recover a previous version of a single file, for instance, right-clicking it in Explorer and selecting Genie Timeline > View All Versions will display your options. You can also look back through versions of all your backed-up files in Timeline Explorer, a special folder which integrates with Explorer. A Search tool helps locate particular files within your backup, while an Advanced Restore option within the program walks you through the process, as well as supporting a few extra options (restore to a different location, restore from an older backup).

If you’ve enabled the Disaster Recovery option when backing up, Timeline will be protecting your Windows, Program, User and other system folders. The program provides a bootable Linux-based environment (a separate download) which enables you to restore these, if your regular Windows installation won’t start.

The Timeline Recycle Bin makes it (a little) easier to find and restore deleted files

Just in case this isn’t enough, Genie Timeline Professional 2014 now also includes the Recycle Bin. If you accidentally delete a backed-up file, then there’s no longer any need to manually search your entire backup to find it; just open the Timeline Recycle Bin. Select one or more files and you can restore them (or wipe them securely, ensuring they’re gone forever) with a click.

There’s some scope for improvement here. When Timeline is so focused on ease of use, for example, why does it leave you to download the recovery environment ISO, burn and verify it yourself? And although the Timeline Recycle Bin is a good idea, there’s a problem. You can sort its contents by name or creation date, but not deletion date, so there’s no easy way to view a block of files which you deleted at a particular time.

For the most part, though, restoration works very well. The fact that your files are stored in regular zip files, rather than some proprietary format, gives you even more ways to locate archived data. And, as ever, while the functionality of Genie Timeline Professional 2014 might not be as strong as we’d like, it remains very easy to use.