[POLL] What is your favorite Backup Software for 2023?

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

This is the definitive Best Backup Software of 2023 official thread. 

It covers both free and commercial backup software, as well as those built into or bundled with operating systems.  Use this as a starting point for researching back-up software.
 
The previous year's thread can be found here.
 
If your choice of a back-up solution is not listed, please choose the appropriate Other option(s) and specify in the comments.  The poll is multiple choice, so if you use more than one solution, you can select all of those.  Be sure to mention which ones you use in the comments. 
  
Regards, 
  
Aryeh Goretsky

[Fleet Command]

A real backup app, as opposed to an app that can simply copy stuff, is an app that can automatically create an incremental history of changes, so that you can revert to an earlier state of disk or files. Sync apps and CloneZilla cannot do that.

Also, XXCopy seems to be dead.

[Chay Meredith]

Is there a good alternative to onedrive to sync/backup my windows? I don't want a different cloud host, as I have MSFTO365

I hate that MSFT just creates a bunch of duplicates and keeps re-downloading crap I deleted. It should prompt for action, with an easy to use ViewDiff GUI. So I can chose what to do, rather than it constantly renaming and breaking everything.

 

[grunger106]

There is Veeam and then there is everything else in the commercial space IMHO.

I'm not sure mixing commercial DR solutions in with free/low cost consumer offerings is going to give you a good result, it's like comparing a £200 8TB USB Hard Disk and a £20,000 8TB SAN - both have the same basic end goal of storing data but the details are very different.

Arguably some of the options aren't backup solutions in my mind - OneDrive isn't designed as a backup solution - It can kind of function as one, sort of but it's a cloud storage solution with decent versioning that can set up sync relationships with 3 folders on your PC.
Better than nothing for a home pc for sure, but not a backup really.

A product to protect your photo collection or clone a disk is a very different beast to one that will protect your VM estate, allow app consistent restores of SQL or Exchange, replicate VMs across hosts or datacentres and cost £1000s.

[+InsaneNutter MVC]

I'm using ARQ Backup at home. After looking at various solutions I chose ARQ as the backups are encrypted with a key that only I have access to and will never leave my local machine, meaning if the cloud provider I choose to backup to is hacked, my data is useless to anyone else.

I can choose from a number of cloud providers, or even a local network share or SFTP server. ARQ also supports compression, de-duplication and incremental backups which helps to keep costs down.

In total I think I'm paying Backblaze B2 between £6-7 per month depending on the exchange rate, for well over 1TB of data backed up. I also have incremental backups spanning several years now.

At work I use Veeam.

[Ixion]

Macrium Reflect at home, Veeam for work

[ThaCrip]

Of those listed...

-Clonezilla (this is my preferred way to image my boot drive (running Linux Mint) from a bootable USB stick (created with Ventoy so I can boot multiple ISO's of OS's etc this way), which I do roughly once every 1-3 months, as it's a reliable way to get back to a working state if something should get out of whack. if I feel there is a higher risk of something breaking, on say a update etc, ill make a image with Clonezilla before attempting it)

-Google Drive (this is minimal use for me though for a very limited amount of generally small files)

 

but for general data backup... a simple manual copy/paste from the file manager works for me (like at a minimum I keep two copies of anything important, one copy on one hard drive and another copy on another hard drive (preferably one hard drive being external)) and occasionally on higher importance data backup (like family pictures/videos etc) I still use what many consider outdated, DVD recordable (Taiyo Yuden/Verbatim) as those are still pretty much the best non-hard drive backup method for long term data storage (lets say long term data storage of 'at least' 10-20 years+ (I have discs roughly 15 years old and are still going strong)) as long as you don't have to backup many TB's of data as then it starts to become a bit impractical as hard drives tend to be better for most data backup (a good balance of convenience(minimal time spent) and decent protection against data loss is the two hard drive method) but on a more limited amount of can't-afford-to-lose data, a additional copy on recordable DVD is extra insurance as the odds of me losing data with that method is slim-to-none, short of natural disaster like house fire/tornado etc (which I am mostly banking on won't happen, although if it did I would probably lose most stuff, potentially everything depending on the situation).

I do have a limited amount of stuff backed up online, but say I had a house fire, whether I could access the stuff online would depend on whether I could save a limited amount of stuff from the house or not before it burned down, so I am gambling here (it would probably be a good idea for me to store a limited amount of stuff like that in a different physical location to give me a reasonable level of protection here, but I keep putting it off). I do have some stuff like recordable DVD's in a safe that's supposedly fire-proof as assuming that holds up then I would not lose a good portion of family photos/videos type of stuff, but even assuming this is good, I have been slacking and don't have it all backed up on DVD, but I generally do pretty well with this on the basics of two hard drives of backup which is pretty good in general, but obviously won't cover all situations, but it's a risk I am basically taking.