Digital data is just as vulnerable to damage or loss as physical data, so don’t risk losing your data and make sure you always back up.
Data backup is one of those tasks that we all know is necessary, but not everyone does it. But if you don’t always have an up to date backup of your PC’s data, you’re one dropped laptop or spilt drink away from potentially never seeing your data ever again. As well as data loss prevention, you might also want to store backups as archives, or restore the data to a new location. Thankfully, there are numerous pieces of data backup software out there that make the process easy and straightforward. Here are some of the best backup programs for Windows PCs.
Acronis True Image 2018
Acronis True Image promises to “never lose another file”, and backs up your data to a local drive and to the cloud. It also has an anti-ransomware feature that is able to detect and reverse unauthorised encryption of a hard drive that may occur due to the interference of cybercriminals, an increasingly common form of extortion. The downside to these features, however, is significantly longer boot times, so where time is of the essence, this may not be the right data backup program to go for. A license for a single device is $49.99, or around £36, and there’s an ongoing subscription for the cloud storage element, which is $4.16 (or £3) a month, in return for £250GB of cloud storage.
Paragon Backup and Recover Advanced
This piece of data backup software has an intuitive backup wizard that makes backing up your data a simple task. One of the standout features of Paragon Backup and Recover Advanced is the ability to create a bootable USB recovery stick, which can be used in the event of your PC not starting. This bootable USB flash drive can be used to fix boot errors preventing start-up. This data backup program is incredibly affordable, at only $29.95, or around £21.
Genie Timeline Home 10
This data backup program promises the user “effortless protection of all your files”, and focusses on traditional hard drive backups, offering mobile and cloud backups as separate programs. There’s a full speed backup known as Turbo Mode, and a slower backup called Smart Mode, and Genie Timeline Home 10 adjusts itself intelligently. The data backup program also has a game/movie mode, preventing any pop-ups from appearing while in full screen mode. Genie Timeline Home 10 has a free trial, and after that, costs $39.95, or £29.
Cobian Backup
While Cobian Backup is certainly lacking in the aesthetic department, it makes up for it in its wealth of features – and the fact that it’s completely free! The data backup program can be used to create and schedule multiple backup jobs, and each of these jobs can have different settings, like file type, encryption settings or backup location. Cobian Backup was funded entirely by donations, and although development has been discontinued, this piece of free data backup software is still available to download and use.
