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Twenty-two states say the Trump administration is illegally freezing money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The administration says the funding is just being "reviewed" and isn't frozen.

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"Wind is unlike many other hazards because you really can't see it," says AAA's Bill Van Tassel.

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At issue is whether a state, in this case, South Carolina, can remove Planned Parenthood clinics from its state Medicaid program, even though Medicaid funds cannot generally be used to fund abortions.

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A federal judge in California has ordered the Trump administration to temporarily restore legal aid to tens of thousands of migrant children who are in the United States without a parent or guardian.

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Potensic Atom 2: one-minute review

Potensic has carved itself a strong reputation in the sub-250g drone category with the release of the Atom SE and Atom drones in recent years. The Potensic Atom 2 is now available, with this latest model taking the coveted title of best sub-250g DJI alternative. It's not perfect – few drones are – but it's an enticing drone for beginners, enthusiasts and more advanced pilots alike.

(Image credit: James Abbott)

Given the features on offer, and what's to come in firmware updates – more on those later – the Atom 2 will sit somewhere between the DJI Mini 3 and the DJI Mini 4 Pro, which is an impressive achievement, especially when the Standard Kit costs just $330 / £300 / AU$580. This makes it only just a little more expensive than the entry-level DJI Mini 4K, making it a strong contender for our best drones guide.

The Atom 2 lets you capture video up to 4K at up to 30fps, in Normal and HDR color profiles; there's also slow-motion video and timelapse capture. Photos can be captured in raw and JPEG, while the camera offers both automatic and manual control. There are also AI Quickshots and AI Track for subject tracking. These features are just the tip of the iceberg, and with great flight performance to boot the Atom 2 is a solid option for many pilots.

Potensic Atom 2: release date and price

• Announced February 2025
• The Standard Kit costs $330 / £300 / AU$580
• The Fly More Bundle costs $430 / £400 /AU$785

The Potensic Atom 2 was announced in February 2025, and is available to purchase directly from the Potensic website and Amazon. The drone is reasonably priced considering the features and functionality on offer and will compete directly with other sub-250g models including the DJI Mini 4K, DJI Mini 3 and the Holy Stone HS900, although it exceeds all three in some areas.

The Atom 2 is available in two kits, with the Atom 2 Standard Kit costing $330 / £300 / AU$580 and comprising the drone, controller, one battery, two sets of spare propellers, phone cables and other accessories.

The Atom 2 Fly More Combo includes all of the above plus two additional batteries, a fast-charging hub, a shoulder bag and two extra sets of spare propellers for $430 / £400 /AU$785. This kit offers excellent value for money.

• Price score: 5/5

(Image credit: James Abbott) Potensic Atom 2: specs Potensic Atom 2: design and handling

• Folding sub-250g design
• Solid build quality
• Excellent controller

With the exception of the DJI Neo, DJI Flip and the HoverAir X1 models, drone design has remained relatively unchanged for years, which is no bad thing – if it isn’t broken, why fix it? The Potensic Atom 2 makes no bold statements in terms of design with its light gray airframe and folding propeller arms, but it is solidly made. Its dimensions extend from a palm-sized 5.63 x 3.46 x 2.28 inches / 143 x 88 x 58mm when folded to 8.3 x 5.98 x 2.28 inches / 210 x 152 x 58mm unfolded.

The main difference with the Atom 2 design-wise is that Potensic claims the new propellers are 40% quieter, and they undoubtedly appear to be quieter, with a lower pitch hum during flights, rather than the higher-pitch whirr we're used to with smaller drones like this.

There's also a green flashing LED on the rear of the drone that's visible over long distances, so it may be bright enough for night flying. Drone strobes must be visible at three miles in the US for night flights, but this distance couldn’t be legally tested.

The only other notable external aspects of the drone are the 3-axis mechanical gimbal, which can be tilted between -90 and +20 degrees so the camera can look up slightly as well as straight down. Plus, there's a basic downward vision system, although I didn’t notice this doing anything when flying low to the ground with an undulating surface. As you'd expect for the price, there's no collision avoidance.

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The controller follows the same design as the controller for the Atom and Atom SE, but has been upgraded and now features a directional antenna that helps maintain a control and video-transmission distance of up to 6.2 miles. During testing, there was occasionally some pixelation and stutter of the video feed, but ensuring the antenna was facing the direction of the drone alleviated this.

Moving back to the design, the controller holds your smartphone between the two comfortable handgrips that extend outwards to insert and then grip the phone. This makes the whole package look more like a smart controller, and the positioning of the phone in the centre between the controllers is much more comfortable than a top-heavy top-mounted phone.

There are six direct-access controls for accessing commonly used functions including the gimbal tilt, digital zoom, a shutter button and a Return to Home button. The two remaining buttons are set to switch the gimbal angle between 0 and -90 degrees and to change the flight mode by default. These two buttons are customizable if you'd like to change them, while the control-stick modes and stick sensitivity are also customizable.

• Design score: 4/5

Potensic Atom 2: features and performance

• Level 5 wind resistance
• AI subject tracking
• AI Quickshots

The Atom 2 is a fantastic flier, with responsive and smooth controls that facilitate seamless maneuvers when capturing video. GPS provides a stable hover, with no drift detected during testing, alongside providing Return to Home functionality which comes with standard RTH functionality and a new smart version.

Dynamic Home Point, when enabled, brings the drone back to the controller location rather than the take-off point when Return to Home is initiated. This may not sound like much, but it's an incredibly useful feature because it's sometimes useful to walk along behind drones during flight to maintain visual line of sight and to help with the performing of precise maneuvers.

This may be a small and lightweight drone, but the Atom 2 offers Level 5 wind resistance, which equates to speeds of up to 23.6mph. Flight modes include Video, Normal and Sport, with Sport mode offering a top speed of 35.8mph, while Video is for slower and smoother flight. There's also built-in Remote ID, which will be a welcome feature for US-based pilots.

Subject tracking is a feature that's becoming increasingly important and popular. It's been around for a while, but the introduction of AI in drones has made it more effective than ever before. The Atom 2 isn’t a selfie drone by any means, but its AI Track options for subject tracking include AI Spotlight, AI Follow and AI Parallel. These all work incredibly well.

(Image credit: James Abbott)

Then there's AI Quickshots, which includes Pull-Away, Spiral, Rocket, Circle, Boomerang and Dolly Zoom. All of these perform well, and most create professional-looking videos.

Dolly Zoom produces a great effect, thanks to combining the digital zoom with flying backwards, but it's not perfect. At the end of the dolly zoom, when the digital zoom is at its maximum, image quality is noticeably reduced, and while it's still a fun feature, it's not for professional use.

All of these effects can be applied to human subjects and inanimate objects simply by drawing around the desired subject in the Potensic Eve app.

Flight times are advertised as being up to 32 minutes per battery, but during testing the batteries typically lasted around 22 minutes before Return to Home was suggested by the drone at 15% battery level. This isn’t too bad, but it does make the Fly More Combo with three batteries and a fast-charging hub an attractive option. The fast-charging hub is claimed to be able to charge three batteries at once in 1.3 hours, and in my experience it was faster with batteries at a 15-30% charge.

Other features pilots will find useful are the Interval Timer for timelapse capture, and Cruise Control. There's also SmartTransfer, which enables you to transfer media files to your phone at speeds of up to 25MB/s. This makes it easier to share photos and videos directly to social media if you like to do this on the go.

• Performance score: 4/5

Potensic Atom 2: image and video quality

• 1/2-inch sensor
• Fixed focus 26mm f/1.8 lens
• 4K video and 12MP Raw photos

(Image credit: James Abbott)

The Atom 2 camera is an improvement on the Atom with improved image quality and additional features, but before we delve into those, let's take a look at the specs.

The camera features a 12/48MP Sony 1/2 in CMOS sensor with 4-in-1 pixels, which is claimed to reduce noise and enhance low-light performance, although if I'm honest I wasn't overly impressed with low-light performance.

The camera lens provides a 26mm equivalent focal length with a fixed f/1.8 aperture. The lens is fixed-focus from 4m to infinity, relying on hyperfocal focusing to achieve a large depth of field.

When it comes to image quality, sharpness is greatest in the center of the frame, with fall-off towards the edges. There's also some vignetting, and white balance can be inconsistent when using Auto and Manual settings, but this can be easily fixed in Lightroom when shooting raw.

Videos are consistently better quality and don’t suffer from these issues. Strangely, even white balance is more reliable for video capture. Moving back to photos, JPEG processing is heavy with strong and noticeable sharpening applied, so the best image quality will always come from raw files.

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You also have the ability to switch between 12MP and 48MP photo capture, but doing so isn’t a straightforward decision when JPEG processing is as it is.

The caveat with 48MP/8K photo capture is that it's only available in JPEG format, and not in raw. This is an odd omission, and one that will hopefully be fixed in a future firmware update, alongside adding a histogram for aiding exposure. You also have the option of 9:16 vertical photo capture, in JPEG only, with file sizes at 1520 x 2704 pixels.

Video can be captured in 4K at 24/25/30fps, 2.7K at 24/25/30fps, FHD at 24/25/30fps, and slow motion FHD at 2/3/4/5x. The maximum video bit rate is 80Mbps, while color profiles currently include Normal and HDR. In a future firmware update, a flat P-Log color profile will be delivered to the Atom 2 for more advanced video capture.

A digital zoom is available at 4K up to 2x, 2.7K up to 3x, and FHD up to 4x. Photos can be zoomed in up to 2x. Image quality reduces but the feature can be useful. Additional photo features include Bracketing, Burst Shooting and Panorama.

The Panorama mode includes Wide Angle, 180 Degree and Vertical options, with Sphere set to be delivered in a future firmware update. Panoramas are stitched in-camera, and saved as JPEGs alongside the constituent images in JPEG format. There's also a Defog mode for shooting in hazy conditions, and an AI Night mode for capturing video at night. The latter reveals more shadow detail at night, but image quality is questionable.

• Image and video quality score: 4/5

Main example video AI Night video Potensic Atom 2: testing scorecard Should I buy the Potensic Atom 2? Buy it if...

You're on a budget
The Atom 2 is one of the most feature-packed 'mini' drones available for such a competitive price, so you can get a lot of bang for your buck with this drone.

You’re a drone beginner
This is a great drone for beginners, but also one that will meet your needs for years to come. In a nutshell, the Atom 2 won’t require an upgrade any time soon.

You'd like log footage
The P-Log color profile will be delivered in a firmware update, making the Atom 2 one of the least-expensive drones to be able to capture video in a flat Log color profile.

Don't buy it if...

You'd like 48MP raw files
Despite the 48MP sensor, 48MP photos can only be captured in JPEG format, with raw capture available at 12MP. If you want higher-resolution raw files you'll have to look elsewhere.

You'd like a telephoto camera
If you'd like a dual-camera drone with a wide-angle and medium telephoto lens the DJI Air 3S is a great option, albeit much more expensive. The Atom 2 does, however, have a digital zoom.

You need collision avoidance
If you'd like collision avoidance for flying confidently in complex environments, the DJI Min 4 Pro is going to be a much better option for you.

Potensic Atom 2: also consider DJI Mini 4K

The DJI Mini 4K is slightly less expensive than the Potensic Atom 2, and offers similar features at a basic level. It doesn't offer the same subject-tracking, or more advanced features such as an interval timer for capturing timelapse videos, but if you'd like an inexpensive DJI drone capable of capturing 4K video and photos in raw and JPEG formats, it's a great budget option.

Read our in-depth DJI Mini 4K review

How I tested the Potensic Atom 2

• I tested all flight features
• I flew the drone in a range of conditions
• I tested all the camera functions

I tested the Potensic Atom 2 over several days of flying in a range of locations, environments and weather conditions (excluding rain) to test flight performance, flight features, overall handling, and image quality for both photo and video capture. All testing is conducted in a way that meets local aviation laws and restrictions to ensure that all flights are safe and legal.

Drones are always tested using manual flight patterns for videos that are typical of professional aerial video techniques for capturing visually interesting footage. This also provides the opportunity to test variables such as the connection between the drone and controller, latency between the two, and the accuracy of the controls and flight accuracy in general.

First reviewed March 2025

Val Kilmer died from pneumonia. He had recovered after a 2014 throat cancer diagnosis that required two tracheotomies.

(Image credit: Mark Humphrey)

This review first appeared in issue 350 of PC Pro.

Zyxel’s SCR 50AXE will appeal to small businesses and home offices that want secure wireless networks without the added expense of separate devices. This desktop router delivers tri-band Wi-Fi 6/6E services, combines these with an integral firewall and Zyxel’s threat management services, and delivers them all at a tempting price.

It looks particularly good value as the price includes a lifetime subscription to Zyxel’s Security Cloud, which enables (deep breath) a firewall, ransomware and malware prevention, VPN proxy, intrusion, dark web and ad blockers, application monitoring, GeoIP country restrictions and protection against mail fraud and phishing. An SCR Pro Pack license adds the Trellix-powered real-time threat intelligence and web filtering services, with a one-year subscription costing around £40.

The router comes with a magnetic desktop base or it can be wall-mounted with the supplied bracket. It sports a WAN and four LAN ports – all of the gigabit variety – while on the wireless side its AX5400-rated access point (AP) claims speeds of 575Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio and 2,400Mbits/sec each for the 5GHz and 6GHz radios. The latter two both support the high-speed 160MHz channels, but with gigabit ports all round you won’t see their full performance potential.

The SCR 50AXE is designed to be managed from Zyxel’s Nebula cloud portal. We found it simple to add it to our account. After logging into the Nebula app on an iPad, we selected our predefined site, scanned in the QR code on the label on the device’s side and added it to our site with one tap.

The portal presents a customizable site dashboard with extra sections for the SCR 50AXE. You can check its uptime and firmware status, see the top ten apps identified by the application identification service and view threat management activity. A second table shows total detections for each category.

You can manage the 50AXE from Zyxel’s Nebula portal and mobile app (Image credit: Future)

Up to four cloud-managed SSIDs are supported, each with their own authentication scheme, including the mandatory WPA3 for Wi-Fi 6E. You can decide which of the three radios are to be active, create custom captive portals for guest networks with click-through, voucher, Facebook or Nebula authentication, enable L2 isolation to stop guest users seeing other devices and apply upload and download rate limits.

You should use Zyxel’s application identification service with extreme caution, as its overheads will reduce wireless performance by up to 50%. We tested this using a Dell Windows 11 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TXE75E Wi-Fi 6E PCI-E adapter and saw close-range file-copying speeds between the client and a server on the gigabit LAN of 112MB/sec, dropping to a respectable 87MB/sec at a distance of ten meters.

Running the test again with application identification enabled saw close range and distance speeds tumble to 48MB/sec and 32MB/sec. While the copy test was running we enabled and disabled the service from the Nebula portal and could see its impact almost instantly.

Threat management is simple to apply, with six slider bars for enabling or disabling each individual component, and you can add exception lists for specific clients and IP addresses plus blocked or allowed web domains. Clicking on the main chart takes you to a monitor page with a map showing where threats are emanating from, and the affected clients with the SCR Pro Pack license extending its reporting period from 24 hours to 30 days.

This license enables content filtering, which offers 103 URL categories to block or allow, and you can fine-tune access by applying custom policies to all or selected clients. We also ran our copy tests with each threat management component progressively enabled and can confirm they have no adverse impact on performance.

The SCR 50AXE is an affordable all-in-one wireless security router for small offices. The fly in the ointment is the application detection service, which hits wireless performance hard, but otherwise the router is easy to manage from the Nebula cloud portal and offers strong threat protection measures for the price.

We've also ranked the best wireless access points.

This review first appeared in issue 350 of PC Pro.

Veritas Backup Exec (BE) has always been one of our top choices for on-premises data protection. It delivers a comprehensive range of backup and recovery services. The BE Simple licensing plans make it very affordable for SMBs, and BE 22.2 on review introduces plenty of new and welcome features.

Microsoft 365 (MS365) backups now support SharePoint and Teams as well as Exchange Online and OneDrive. Microsoft Azure Object Lock provides ransomware-protected immutable cloud storage, backups to ReFS volumes can be accelerated, anomaly detection protects backup scripts from tampering, and BE now uses the FIPs-compliant deduplication engine from Veritas’ enterprise NetBackup product.

The simple yearly subscription service is based only on compute instances, which can be a physical system, a virtual machine or ten MS365 users. The starter five-instance Simple Core Pack costs an agreeable £489 per year, and Veritas generously includes a bonus instance for an extra ten MS365 users.

Deployment is swift; we installed BE on a Dell PowerEdge R760xs Windows Server 2022 host in 20 minutes. After declaring our physical servers using their IP addresses, BE pushed the remote agent to them while for our Hyper-V systems, we just needed the agent loaded on the host to secure all its virtual machines.

Adding our VMware vSphere host was simple, and we only had to provide its IP address and credentials. MS365 couldn’t be any easier, either: we added our tenant using the link provided by BE and entered the unique device code it generated for us.

All four components of MS365 can be secured (Image credit: Future)

Backup job creation is simple, too: you just select sources from the list presented and choose from a range of predefined strategies. These include backup to disk or cloud, and you can add extra stages in the job for local and offsite backup, replication to other disk stores or conversion to VMs, and add an essential air gap by migrating backup data to tape drives attached to the BE host.

BE supports plenty of storage locations, including physical and virtual disks, cloud, tape, deduplicating stores and network shares. For our tests, we created a local store on the BE server, used a multi-TB share on a Synology NAS appliance and added immutable cloud storage using an Amazon S3 bucket with Object Lock enabled.

Veritas takes data protection very seriously, and the job wizard always advises you to enable encryption. You can choose from 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption and, if required, only allow the user that created the key for a job to recover data from it.

Data restoration is another pleasant experience: you select a source, view its files, folders or volumes, pick a recovery point and decide where to send them. Creating a simplified recovery disk brings bare metal recovery into play, BE’s Instant GRT (granular recovery technology) is used to restore items such as SQL databases and the Instant VM Recovery feature takes seconds to create a new VM from a backup set. MS365 backups require a deduplicating store, and the best practice is to apply encryption at the store and not the job level otherwise data reduction may not be as efficient. We created one job to protect our Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint sites and Teams data and used the restore wizard to recover data by choosing a component and selecting a time point.

SMBs that want every data backup and recovery angle covered will love Backup Exec 22.2. It offers a superb range of features, is a strong candidate for protecting virtual environments, cloud support is excellent and it’s very competitively priced.

We've also rated the best free video conferencing software.

This review first appeared in issue 350 of PC Pro.

We hoped to include the MultiSync E274FL in our annual group test of “everyday” monitors, but NEC has kept us waiting for this enterprise-friendly screen.

Especially friendly when the E274FL combines three alluring properties: a low price, USB-C docking and integrated wired networking.

As immediately became clear when I put it on my desk, it also produces excellent whites. It’s this, rather than a huge color gamut, that’s most important to office workers after all. The panel’s evident quality was backed up in our tests, where it covered 95% of the sRGB gamut with an average Delta-E of 1.08 and maximum of 3.03. Those are strong figures, even if film lovers won’t be wowed by DCI-P3 coverage of 75%, or print designers by 70% of the Adobe RGB gamut.

A measured contrast ratio of 3,493:1 also confirms that this is an MVA panel rather than IPS. MVA stands for multidomain vertical alignment, and it’s far more commonly found in curved, gaming monitors than monitors aimed at enterprises. Its use here shows that Sharp (maker of the panel and co-owner of the NEC brand) has matured the technology enough to rival IPS. For instance, the faint yellow bias that used to be seen in MVA screens isn’t visible here.

Connect over USB-C and the display supplies 60W of power (Image credit: Future)

I’m also used to seeing high refresh rates and low response rates on MVA panels, but the E274FL’s 60Hz and 6ms are bog-standard times. Office workers hoping for a speed advantage in after-hours gaming sessions will be out of luck.

IT departments, on the other hand, will be delighted. While the RJ-45 port gives users fast and secure access to the office network, it gives administrators a way to track their assets and even take control of the OSD without needing to touch the device itself. For example, they may decide that rather than allow the screens to hit their peak brightness – stated as 250cd/m2, but 297cd/m2 in our unit’s case – that the monitor stays in one of its two Eco modes. These lock it to either 30% or 70% brightness, and while the former is dim I found the latter mode to be more than bright enough.

End users should find the OSD relatively easy to navigate. It uses a joystick, with its one quirk being that you need to press right to select an option rather than pressing down as people may be used to. But I don’t expect many calls to the support team to check; trial and error is your friend, and the OSD is extremely quick to respond to commands.

Naturally, this monitor ticks all the ergonomic boxes. There’s a low blue light mode, TCO certification and superb flexibility: 120mm of height adjustment, 170° of easy swivel in both directions, and a pivot mode. Often the latter is pointless owing to a lack of contrast and viewing angles in a vertical orientation, but that definitely doesn’t apply to the E274FL.

With height adjustment, swivel and pivot, the E274FL is supremely flexible (Image credit: Future)

I mentioned right at the top that this is a docking monitor, and if you connect over USB-C then it supplies 60W of power to connected laptops; plenty for all the machines in our Labs this month, but I would have liked to see 100W to feed more powerful MacBooks. There are three USB-A ports, and it’s reassuring to see a USB-B port as well; this means you can share peripherals between a laptop on USB-C and a PC that uses the HDMI or DisplayPort inputs.

NEC also provides a pair of reasonable 1W speakers. As their power output suggests, these aren’t going to rock your world, but they’re fine for the occasional YouTube clip and video calls. Before you buy, there’s one final thing to consider. This is a 1,920 x 1,080 panel, and across a 27in diagonal that means text isn’t crisp. There’s a fuzziness to character edges in Word and Excel. This may not have a tangible effect on most workers’ productivity, but a new generation of employees used to pixel-sharp displays on their phones and tablets may not be impressed.

Still, that resolution is reflected in the price. A price that includes a three-year warranty, which covers backlight failures too. If the MultiSync E274FL had arrived in time for our group test, it would have blown away the similarly priced competition for its quality and its connectivity – which is why it walks away with a Recommended award.

We also ranked the best laptops for businesses.

Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced plans for her visit after U.S. Vice President JD Vance visited a U.S. air base in Greenland last week and accused Denmark of underinvesting in the territory.

(Image credit: Evgeniy Maloletka)

This review first appeared in issue 350 of PC Pro.

Many business backup solutions require a dedicated Windows Server host, but Nakivo’s Backup & Replication (NBR) is far more amenable as it can be deployed to just about any platform you care to name. It will run happily on a Windows host, but also supports Linux, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV, AWS EC2, Raspberry Pi and all the main NAS appliance vendors, including Qnap and Synology.

On review is NBR 10.9, which includes bare metal recovery where you use its new Bootable Media Wizard to restore physical Windows and Linux servers from selected backups. Malware protection is now available, with NBR integrating with a range of third-party antivirus products, and all MS365 components, including Teams, can be protected.

Licensing is equally versatile. There are five versions available, with options for perpetual licenses or per-workload subscriptions. Nakivo cuts through any confusion with a cost calculator on its website. We’ve shown the price for an Enterprise 10-server perpetual license with a two-year 24/7 support contract here.

For testing, we chose Qnap’s TS-855eU-RP short-depth 8-bay rack NAS and used the QuTS Hero App Center to load the NBR package. NBR comprises three service components, with a Director for browser-based management, Transporters to handle backup, replication and recovery operations, and Repositories for storing backups.

After adding protected systems to NBR’s inventory, it pushed the transporter service to our physical Windows servers and workstations; note that Mac clients are still not supported. For Hyper-V, the service just needed loading on our host, while for our VMware vSphere host, we only had to provide its credentials for agentless VM backups.

Our Qnap appliance received a default local repository but this was on its system SSDs, so we created another on a large-capacity RAID5 pool. During creation, you must enter the absolute path, which can be found from an SSH session using the Linux List command.

Other possibilities for repositories are local storage, network shares or cloud stores. Ransomware protection comes into play with NBR supporting immutable cloud storage from Amazon EC2 and S3, Microsoft Azure Blob, Wasabi and Backblaze B2.

Services can be extended to MS365 Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams (Image credit: Future)

Creating backup jobs is simple as options are based on the systems in your inventory. Just choose those you want to protect, assign a repository, set a schedule and decide how daily, weekly, monthly and yearly recovery points you want retained.

For our Hyper-V host, we chose the VMs to be included, and protecting our VMware vSphere system only required the host to be selected so any new VMs would be automatically added to the schedule. To use malware protection, you declare a “scan server” to NBR, which has the required antivirus software running on it.

MS365 licensing is separate, with ten users costing £252 per year, and it requires a special SaaS repository to store backups, which we found isn’t currently supported by QuTS Hero 5.1. Nakivo’s attentive support suggested creating an iSCSI target on the appliance and mapping it to a Windows system running the transporter service – hardly elegant, but it does work.

Recovery features are outstanding. Along with files and folders, granular restores can be used for MS365 items, SQL databases and on-premises Exchange objects. Disaster recovery is just as good, with Flash Boot jobs creating new VMs directly from the backup repository and facilities for replicating VMs as clones.

SMBs that don’t want their backup software tied to a Windows Server host will love Nakivo’s Backup & Replication 10.9 as they can run it on almost any hardware platform and OS they want. It’s good value, MS365 protection is handled well and it provides extensive data recovery services.

We also rated the best file-hosting services.

This review first appeared in issue 350 of PC Pro.

Hornetsecurity’s VM Backup is designed specifically to protect VMware and Hyper-V environments. It presents a clever management console where most operations can be carried out using nothing more than drag and drop.

VM Backup’s perpetual licenses are based only on the number of hosts, regardless of the sockets each one has. There’s also a subscription model where licensing is charged on the monthly number of VMs being backed up.

A perpetual Standard edition starts at £348 and allows you to back up five VMs per host. You can protect all VMs on each host with the Unlimited edition (£426 per host), while the Unlimited Plus edition on review ups the price to £536 and enables all the features VM Backup has to offer.

And features there are aplenty, with Unlimited Plus 9 enabling support for immutable cloud storage on Amazon S3 and Wasabi, and Azure Blob coming soon. When creating offsite backup locations, you configure these locations as immutable, which brings the Object Lock mechanism into play and turns them into ransomware-resilient WORM repositories.

We installed VM Backup on a Windows Server 2019 host and had our VMware and Hyper-V hosts declared in 15 minutes. After assigning a local hard disk backup repository, we dragged and dropped selected VMs onto it and started our first backups.

VM Backup supports local and external storage, iSCSI targets and UNC paths for NAS shares as backup destination options. For secondary off-site locations you can use physical devices, network shares, the free Offsite Backup Server app and standard or immutable cloud storage. We added a Synology NAS share for our on-site backups and an Amazon S3 bucket with Object Lock enabled for immutable off-site cloud storage.

Plenty of backup destinations are supported (Image credit: Future)

Two predefined backup schedules are provided, but it’s easy to create your own with the preferred weekly and monthly recurrences, versioning and retention policies. Each job can include replication to the secondary location. You add VMs by dragging and dropping them on the desired schedule and retention policy icons.

Along with a cloud console for managing multiple VM Backup installations, Unlimited Plus adds constant data protection (CDP) which is enabled on selected VMs and set to run as often as every five minutes. Both Unlimited and Unlimited Plus provide inline deduplication for faster backups, and you can view your storage savings from the dashboard.

A wizard guides you through the data recovery process: you choose a VM, restore its virtual hard disk, clone it or boot it straight from a backup to its original host or to another one. If you need to retrieve a file, folder or on-premises Exchange item, VM Backup provides granular recovery technology (GRT) services.

For data restoration, all three VM Backup versions use the Sandbox & Verification feature to confirm the integrity of all backups. Along with verifying data, it runs a background job that clones a VM back to the original host and confirms that it runs correctly.

VM Backup is an affordable choice for Hyper-V and VMware environments. The Unlimited Plus version delivers a wealth of features at a great price, support for immutable cloud storage, adds valuable ransomware protection and it’s incredibly easy to use.

We've ranked the best virtual machine software.

Brazil's foreign ministry revealed that the administration of Jair Bolsonaro, the right-wing predecessor of current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, had conducted espionage against Paraguay.

(Image credit: Chiang Ying-ying)

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for April 2.

National Democrats sent in millions for the liberal's campaign while Trump endorsed — and Musk financed — the conservative's. Abortion, redistricting and Tesla could come before the court. 

(Image credit: Vincent Alban)

Republicans won special elections in two Florida Congressional districts. The margins of victory in the heavily-Republican districts were significantly narrower than in November.

(Image credit: Joe Raedle)

I review the best camera phones, but I recently bought myself a dedicated camera. I carry a Galaxy S25 Ultra and an iPhone 16 Pro daily, yet I just bought a camera that's intentionally simpler.

My phones boast optical zoom up to 5X and digital reach well beyond that. I chose a camera with a fixed lens and a field of view slightly wider than my natural vision.

I'm continually impressed by what the best camera phones achieve, but Samsung, Apple, and every phone maker could learn a lot from a camera like the Fujifilm X100VI and today’s best point-and-shoot cameras.

An iPhone 16 Pro (left) with a Galaxy S25 Ultra (right) (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

My Galaxy S25 Ultra has five cameras, and the iPhone 16 Pro has four. Their largest sensors barely top three-quarters of an inch diagonally. The smallest, for the periscope zoom, are minuscule: 0.4 inches (Samsung) and 0.33 inches (iPhone).

My Fujifilm X-T5 uses an APS-C sensor – smaller than a full-frame (35mm film size) but still around 1.12-inches diagonally. That dwarfs any smartphone sensor.

The largest smartphone sensors currently are the one-inch sensors used by makers like Oppo and Xiaomi. Curiously, these aren't found in models you can buy in the US.

Camera phones do the opposite of what they should

Orchids at the New York Botanical Garden, shot with my Fujifilm X-T5 (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Why this focus on sensor size? Because it's the spec that really counts, especially on phones where the difference between the smallest and largest sensors is vast, not marginal.

So why don't Samsung or Apple use a full frame sensor? They demand power and physical space – luxuries smartphones lack.

Unfortunately, smartphones often make the opposite error. Instead of one great sensor, they cram in so many tiny sensors that none produce genuinely memorable images.

It’s ambitious what smartphones attempt. Today’s best range from wide-angle (near 18mm) to telephoto (200mm+), with a wide f/1.6 aperture and macro focus. You can buy an 18-200mm camera lens, but not a lens that is this fast (even f/2.8) without spending thousands.

Every smartphone chases the holy grail: an ultra-wide to super-telephoto zoom with microscopic focus. It's unrealistic. To chase it, makers cut corners, yielding phones technically capable but often failing to capture keepers – photos worth saving, printing, and cherishing – real photos.

Apple and Samsung, meet my new friend Fujifilm

Fine details and soft bokeh, shot with my Fujifilm X-T5 (Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)

Fujifilm gets it. The camera world is buzzing about the Fujifilm X100VI – it's the blueprint smartphones should follow. It uses a large APS-C sensor and a fixed 23mm lens (a 35mm equivalent). It captures phenomenal photos.

No magic here. Fujifilm pairs a great sensor with a versatile prime lens. A fixed lens often means fewer elements, yielding sharper, brighter images. With its 40MP, you can crop digitally and still have a print-worthy resolution.

Image 1 of 3

(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)Shot with my Fujifilm X-T5Image 2 of 3

(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)Shot with my iPhone 16 ProImage 3 of 3

(Image credit: Philip Berne / Future)Shot with my Galaxy S25 Ultra

I crave this from camera phones: one large sensor, not five tiny ones. One superb lens, not a jumble of folded glass and pinholes. Use the space saved from extra sensors for one real camera with a resolution for digital zoom.

The big problem with the Fujifilm X100VI is that you can't buy one. Every reputable retailer has the camera back ordered for months, and the aftermarket is rife with shady scams or folks selling the camera at a 25% markup.

Taking smartphone photography to the edge

Like this, but make the camera really good (Image credit: Future / Lance Ulanoff)

That leaves an amazing opportunity for the smartphone market to step in with a stylish phone that focuses on high-quality photography instead of winning a spec war with megapixels and zoom.

Ironically, the rumored thin smartphones might nudge things this way. We've seen Samsung's teased Galaxy S25 Edge with only two rear lenses. The latest iPhone 16e uses just one, with a wide f/1.6 aperture, but its sensor remains small. Still, closer.

Give me an iPhone 17 with a massive sensor and a single wide lens – I’d be ecstatic. Forget the megapixel race and the lens count. Just give me light, captured beautifully through one great eye.

Staff that administer programs to help the elderly, disabled people and poor families with basic needs lost their jobs amid the Trump administration's layoffs.

(Image credit: Amy Sancetta)

• SpaceX apparently wants to block Globalstar's access to some satellite frequencies
• Globalstar receives Apple funding to help expand iPhone's satellite features
• Apple and SpaceX may have previously failed to make a deal over a collaboration

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Apple are reportedly in a spat that could ultimately lead to spotty signals for services like Starlink and iPhone satellite communications or a homogenous monopolistic satellite service – neither of which would be great for anyone.

The report comes from The Wall Street Journal (behind a paywall) who say sources familiar with the matter claim SpaceX is pushing US federal regulators to not allow Apple-funded satellite service Globalstar to expand its usage of limited satellite radio frequencies.

This comes after SpaceX and Apple have reportedly been in conversations to more closely collaborate on Apple’s growing satellite communication service, but with talks ending with no direct deal – instead SpaceX and T-Mobile will be able to offer their alternative to Apple’s satellite service on iPhones (with the service due to debut this summer).

Apple instead wants to rely on non-SpaceX networks to support its own satellite communication features – but if Musk’s company gets its way, Apple may struggle to expand without SpaceX’s backing.

Reach for the stars

A Starlink dish allowing internet access in a remote place (Image credit: Starlink)

As a quick and simple explanation: all satellites send signals to Earth using radio frequencies, and so to ensure service reliability, many parts of the world will license specific frequencies within the radio spectrum on a regional basis. This is to ensure two companies with satellites operating in the same place don’t get their signals all muddled together because they’re trying to use the same frequency.

SpaceX (or any other satellite company) would want to try and control as many of these frequencies as possible because it allows it to send more data, or send data more quickly – which ultimately leads to a better service for its customers.

But one company locking down too many frequencies in a region stops other companies from being able to offer satellite services there – leading to frustrating dead zones – or forces them to offer a worse service there because they can only use a limited band of frequencies. For consumers it also could lead to price gouging, as the service with the most (or total) satellite signal control can charge what it wants.

This latest contest over satellite frequencies likely won’t be the last, but it highlights an issue with this important communication frontier.

Getting reliable internet and signal service to remote services can only be a good thing – as we’ve already seen from people using their iPhone’s Emergency SOS via satellite tool to call for help when they had no other option – but if it isn’t handled with care we could end up with an overly fractured network or one that’s controlled by a lucky few that got there first.

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• A hacker claims to be selling data stolen from Check Point
• Security firm says data is from an old breach that has been dealt with
• But some security experts aren't convinced by this explanation

A hacker is claiming to have stolen a “highly sensitive” dataset from Check Point - but the company is looking to play down any concerns users might have.

The cybercriminal, going by the name of CoreInjection, posted about the dataset of compromised Check Point files on a cybercrime forum - and alleges that the information contains user credentials, employee contract information, and internal network maps, among other things.

A spokesperson from Check Point told TechRadar Pro that they “really wouldn’t call it a breach”, and added that this was “one account with limited access on a portal”. The firm’s statement assures that this is an “old, known and very pinpointed event,” that only involved a few organizations, and “ does not include customers’ systems , production or security architecture.”

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“If this is completely fake, I’d be surprised”

However, concerns have been raised in the cybersecurity industry, with Hudson Rock CTO, Alon Gal saying that there is a “high certainty” that Check Point has been hacked, with a threat actor appearing to have “gained access to an administrator account with serious privileges.”

Whilst the researcher argues he would be surprised, he also explains that the breach is “not yet officially confirmed”.

In Check Point’s official response, it confirmed a breach did occur, but that this was a long time ago, and that the hacker is just recycling old information which “falsely implies exaggerated claims which never happened.”

“This was handled months ago, and didn’t include the description detailed on this message. These organisations were updated and handled at that time, and this is not more than the regular recycling of old information. We believe that at no point was there a security risk to Check Point , its customers or employees,” the spokesperson told us.

In 2024, Check Point VPN software was targeted by hackers in order to gain access to corporate networks, although these attempts were largely unsuccessful, and Check Point outlined a simple and easy fix.

Via The Register

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