What software do you use for backup?

I used to run crashplan when they had a home edition. It was a great value because it was basically unlimited offsite backup for multiple machines at a low price. When that went away I could not find anything comparable for even close to the old price.

So I've been using Macrium Reflect paid versions for a few years now. It has been very reliable. No surprise corruption or anything whenever I have needed to restore something. The paid version is a lot better than the free edition because it allows incremental backups which is very important for space saving. I run the "Incrementals forever" mode with 30 days retention on my most important machines at home and at work too. Unfortunately Macrium raised their prices at the start of the year, especially on some of the business products, so I will be looking at other options when renewal time comes around again. (to be fair I'll probably stick with them and just not upgrade the licenses until push comes to shove)
 
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Windows also has built in backup capability but I recommend steering clear of it. I got burned by their full OS disk backup when, upon trying to restore an image, it turned out the restore function was deprecated and non functional. Then I could never get the file history feature to prune its backup sets so it would inevitably fill up whatever storage device you targeted and then stop working without telling you anything was wrong.
 
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I use Synology "Active Backup for Business" its free for any Synology device with unlimited licences. I use it as a "Bare Metal" backup of Windows / Ubuntu machinces. If they fail I can simply recover the files or restore the complete system if a hard drive goes down.
I set mine to backup each asset once a week and hold the last 5 backups. I couldn't praise this system enough and if you have a Synology NAS you would be a fool not to use it.
Once you see how amazing it is you would wonder why its free (it has been free for many years) I guess they use it as a perk to sell more hardware.
 
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cyberwolf_uk said:
I use Synology "Active Backup for Business" its free for any Synology device with unlimited licences. I use it as a "Bare Metal" backup of Windows / Ubuntu machinces. If they fail I can simply recover the files or restore the complete system if a hard drive goes down.
I set mine to backup each asset once a week and hold the last 5 backups. I couldn't praise this system enough and if you have a Synology NAS you would be a fool not to use it.
Once you see how amazing it is you would wonder why its free (it has been free for many years) I guess they use it as a perk to sell more hardware.
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I use that as well, along with Acronis. I also use Synology Hyperbackup which is designed to backup the Synology NAS unit. All are great backup solutions.
 
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Best thing I've found for data files is 7-zip. Reliable, multi-platform, no vendor nagging you with new versions.
 
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Haven't used Acronis but it looks a quite good. I use Hyperbackup to backup my data on my NAS to my offsite NAS, not to mention their snapshot feature.. Overhaul they have some excellent software in that department. All they need to do now is put some better processors in their prosumer devices ;)
 
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cyberwolf_uk said:
Haven't used Acronis but it looks a quite good. I use Hyperbackup to backup my data on my NAS to my offsite NAS, not to mention their snapshot feature.. Overhaul they have some excellent software in that department. All they need to do now is put some better processors in their prosumer devices ;)
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Yes, I forgot to mention the snapshot backup program that is also part of Synology. It's a great tool that keeps multiple versions of a file so you can restore back to any point in time. As far as the processor speed, Synology doesn't need the fastest cpu, similar to Blue Iris. Their NAS units have just enough processing power to get the job done, but keep energy usage to a minimum.
 
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Jim I. said:
Yes, I forgot to mention the snapshot backup program that is also part of Synology. It's a great tool that keeps multiple versions of a file so you can restore back to any point in time. As far as the processor speed, Synology doesn't need the fastest cpu, similar to Blue Iris. Their NAS units have just enough processing power to get the job done, but keep energy usage to a minimum.
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They do if you are using it for other things, Plex server, multiple VM's for example. Since they moved to their AMD chips you loose hardware transcoding for example. And if you move up to their XS range you lose SHR
 
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Jim I. said:
Yes, I forgot to mention the snapshot backup program that is also part of Synology. It's a great tool that keeps multiple versions of a file so you can restore back to any point in time.
Click to expand...

Snapshots are wonderful in case you get a ransomware infection too, because you can just restore your lost stuff from the most recent clean snapshot. I wish all NAS systems had that capability.
 
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For many years I have used Cobian Backup. It's very reliable with ton of options. It's completely free but the backup process is a bit slow.
Macrium Reflect is the only "professional" alternative which supports backup encryption and is free. But the program always stopped working after a few days and I couldn't solve it (reinstall didn't help).
Now I'm using Acronis True Image 2020. It's great, easy to configure, very very fast and doesn't make my laptop loud. Acronis is expensive as it's subscription based (some 50$/year) but you can buy 2020 "lifetime" version at eBay for 50$ or at eneba.com for 30$ (I've bought it there).
 
I've been using Drive Snapshot for many years. It has a windows GUI and can also be called in bat files with a ton of options. It is one exe and has a 5 year free upgrade for the single license. Supports VSS and has its own similar system from before VSS existed. Also backups some linux file systems. Great for bare metal recovery and also for incremental, differential backups. I've tried just about everything else mentioned in this thread and can't beat it for ease of use, speed and flexibility.

For their website: Drive Snapshot
Demo free version works for a while and is same as full version. Worth a look.
 
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