Our focus in this guide is on backup software for home and small business environments, where there's no IT staff and no managed network. Getting all the bells and whistles you think you need, especially if you have multiple devices to protect, can run up a pretty hefty bill. Those that offer a free version try (sometimes very aggressively) to upsell you to one of their paid plans, which typically come in multiple tiers, in home and commercial versions, and with varying discounts for longer subscription terms and multiple licenses. We were even more surprised by the sheer number and complexity of purchase and subscription options for those products. You might be startled by just how many third-party backup products there are to choose from.
Good backup software offers an effortless way to migrate your PC or Mac when you upgrade to a new device, allowing you to be productive immediately without having to reinstall apps or re-create settings. Those backup files come in handy even if you didn't have a data catastrophe. Or you can boot from recovery media to restore an entire image. The option to save backup files on a local drive, on a network server, or in the cloudĪnd when the day arrives that you have to call on those backups to recover your files, a good backup program will allow you to quickly mount that backup image as a virtual drive to retrieve individual files or folders.Ongoing backups that can save your work daily, hourly, or in real-time, so you never risk losing important work.The ability to create a disk image that can restore the entire contents of a PC or Mac, so you can recover quickly after a disk crash or other data disaster.On the backup side, these are the features that matter most: Read More Backup software features to look for But, which one is best for you? Let's look at the top cloud storage options. Free and cheap personal and small business cloud storage services are everywhere.