Data is a key resource in running businesses today. It powers business intelligence and helps unearth trends in the market, areas worth improving internally as well as new opportunities for growth. As such, having backup software has never been more important, as it is central to maintaining the integrity and availability of your data in the event of data failure or data corruption.
What is Backup Software?
Backup software is software that copies data from databases, servers, and devices like desktops to protect business data during occurrences that render critical business data inaccessible. Such occurrences include data corruption, cyber attacks such as ransomware, physical disasters, and human error.
How Does Backup Software Work?
In an organizational setting, backup software is often configured by IT or operations departments. In addition to making copies of critical data, backup software ensures that data is updated regularly. This may be done through scheduled, continual, and automated data scans. If the scans detect changes in data, data is updated through a new backup.
The new backup may be carried out as a full, differential, or incremental backup. A full backup takes data in its entirety to be backed up. A differential backup saves all changes from the last full backup. Incremental backups capture only the changes from a previous incremental backup. If data loss occurs, backup software restores data to a state from its last backup.
Also read: Employing SIEM in the Network Security Fight
Comparing the Best Backup Software
Before we look at each backup software in detail, let’s first see how they compare to each other.
| Software | Versioning | Remote Backup | Data Deduplication | Virtual Machines | Encrypted Storage | Storage Capacity |
| OwnBackup | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Veeam | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Druva inSync | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| NAKIVO | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| afi.ai Backup for G Suite and O365 | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Comet Backup | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? | ? |
OwnBackup
OwnBackup is the only Salesforce enterprise backup solution, which safeguards users from losing mission-critical data and metadata. OwnBackup is among the backup software industry leaders and protects users’ data through automated backups and swift data recovery. Data corruption and loss caused by rogue applications, human error, errors in integration, and other threat actors can benefit from the recovery offered by OwnBackup.
Key Differentiators
- Secure, automated backups. OwnBackup allows users to configure and automate daily backups regardless of size or complexity. It also offers a backup on-demand feature, allowing users to capture data instantly.
- Proactive data monitoring. Users can configure thresholds to pick out statistical outliers in data as well as customize alerts about significant modifications in data. Through instant notifications, users are alerted as soon as data incidents take place.
- Isolation of data changes. Through comparing data, customers can identify data changes between two backups. They can also isolate metadata changes between two backups through metadata comparison. Visualization through graphs keeps users on top of the occurrence of data anomalies.
- Rapid, stress-free recovery. Through OwnBackup’s recovery, users can isolate data incidents, precisely recover the data they need and easily locate records in data to ease compliance or recover corrupted or deleted data.
Con: The UI can be clunky.
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is a comprehensive solution that offers not only data protection but also AI-based anti-malware, antivirus, and endpoint protection management in one. The integration and automation Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud offers managed service providers (MSPs) increases their productivity while reducing the complexity of security, reporting, daily operations among others while cutting down on operating costs. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud provides users with modern cyber protection.
Key Differentiators
- Acronis Active Protection. Acronis’ anti-ransomware technology ensures MSPs protect their clients from the cyber threats of today. It has built-in automatic ransomware recovery and carries out AI-based analysis of zero-day threats.
- #CyberFit Score. #CyberFit Score improves client security posture by assessing and scoring various metrics to unearth gaps and provide guidance on improving security.
- Predefined protection plans. Acronis empowers MSPs to protect their clients’ workloads and environments by conveniently selecting one of three pre-configured protection plans.
- Blockchain-based file notarization. Clients can notarize any to gain proof of the authenticity of their data. Notarization yields an immutable and publicly verifiable certificate to validate data authenticity.
Cons: Recovery speed from the cloud server may be slow. It may also be a challenge for new users to understand the UI.
Veeam Backup and Replication
With more than 400k customers, Veeam Backup and Replication is a provider of backup solutions that offers availability to physical, virtual, cloud, and Kubernetes workloads. These backup solutions are reliable, flexible, and simple, allowing users to improve their focus on other aspects of their business. To provide flexibility to customers and improve the effectiveness of solutions, Veeam is hardware-agnostic as well as software-defined.
Key Differentiators
- Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP). Veeam helps users minimize data loss and downtime for their workloads through built-in Continuous Data Protection. As a result, users enjoy instant recoveries to the latest state or a point of choice.
- Lowest-cost archive storage. Veeam backups to the lowest cost archive storage classes in GCP, Azure, and AWS, allowing users to hit their data retention targets while optimizing the costs.
- Reliable Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) backup. Reliable RHV backup lets customers create efficient backups of RHV virtual machines utilizing native change block tracking. This allows users to be ready for any calamity.
- Veeam-powered BaaS & DRaaS. Veeam, through a partnership with a network of MSPs and cloud service providers, provides Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) to mitigate downtime and data loss.
Con: Veeam may come off as complex, presenting a learning curve for new users.
Druva inSync
Druva inSync provides data management and protection for SaaS applications. It offers a centralized tool to manage and backup the many cloud applications and services adopted by enterprises today. The increase of data within cloud applications implies a greater risk of data loss and increased complexity of tracking and monitoring data to fulfill regulatory and legal obligations. Regardless of where the data resides, Druva offers enterprises the tools to regain control over these challenges.
Key Differentiators
- Cloud endpoint backup and recovery. Druva inSync employs an incremental backup model to ensure that subsequent backups are faster. It runs invisible backup windows and also grants end-users access to carry out the self-service restore.
- Endpoint data management. Druva manages data endpoints to prevent data loss through data loss prevention (DLP) with remote wipe. Druva inSync’s data management also offers ransomware protection and recovery.
- Federated searches. Federated (metadata) searches allow IT departments to speedily find files across all devices, users, and backup locations.
- Automated and proactive compliance monitoring. Druva inSync offers compliance monitoring to enable IT departments to centrally monitor and deal with potential risks and violations to at-rest sensitive data.
Con: The recovery process may be slow.
NAKIVO Backup and Replication
Trusted by over 19,000 organizations worldwide, NAKIVO Backup and Replication provides an affordable, speedy, and reliable data protection solution for SaaS, virtual, physical, and cloud environments. NAKIVO Backup and Replication offers built-in features that better the performance and increase the reliability of backup and recovery processes, cutting time and money spent by large enterprises.
Key Differentiators
- 1-minute deployment. NAKIVO Backup and Replications 1-click deployment helps users save time by deploying pre-configured VMware and Nutanix enterprise virtualization solutions and Amazon Machine Image in under a minute through a single click.
- Streamlined data protection. Streamlining data protection automatically protects machines matching policy rules. It can be based on machine name, location, size, among others.
- Incremental backup. NAKIVO’s incremental backup identifies changed data blocks (increments) of backup jobs to be copied to the Backup Repository. Resultantly, users enjoy reduced backup sizes and quicker backups.
- Image-based backup. NAKIVO’s image-based backups capture entire virtual machines, with configuration and disk files, to ensure that data in applications stays consistent and recovery-ready.
Con: The user interface can come off as cumbersome and dated.
Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs
Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs enables IT resellers, consultants, and managed service providers to offer backup and recovery services. Managed service providers offer these services to Microsoft Office 365 mailboxes, files in OneDrive and SharePoint storage, Teams, and Windows-based endpoints. Through a subscription model, Altaro Office 365 Backup for MSPs allows MSPs to pay per user, per month.
Key Differentiators
- Hassle-free Office 365 mailbox backup. Office 365 mailbox backup provides MSPs the convenience and ease of carrying out backups for the user and group mailboxes of their customers to Altaro’s Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
- OneDrive and SharePoint Document Library backups. These backups offer MSPs the flexibility to choose what to backup per customer, within their SharePoint and OneDrive accounts.
- Minimal recovery point objective. Minimal recovery point objective backs up Microsoft 365 data up to four times a day. MSPs are assured of a low recovery point objective (RPO) in case of damage or loss of customer data.
Con: Inability to specify when backups should take place.
afi.ai Backup for G Suite and O365
afi.ai Backup for G Suite and O365 is a cloud data management platform powered by modern cloud architecture that leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate a number of administrative tasks and improve resiliency. Afi Google Workspace (previously known as G Suite) and Microsoft 365 backup offers better backup and restore performance in comparison to legacy options, a responsive user interface, and straightforward SLA-based protection settings.
Key Differentiators
- Disaster forecasting and prevention. Afi uses thousands of data points to predict downtime as well as potential data loss occurrences. Afi analyses data such as API endpoints and SaaS providers’ availability metrics to not only predict but prevent potential incidences.
- Intelligent ransomware protection. Afi’s intelligent ransomware protection protects users from data breaches and loss through intelligent attack detection, instant pre-emptive backups, auto-labeling recovery points, and immutable backup storage.
- No backup failures. Afi intelligently handles Google workspace as well as O365 API errors, carries out parallel execution, automatic reschedules, and retries of problematic backup processes to ensure all backups are successful.
- Simple end-to-end automation. Afi automatically carries out backup schedules based on levels of protection set by admins for organizational units or single users.
Con: Afi does not support services outside Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.
Comet Backup
Comet Backup is a flexible, innovative, and configurable backup platform that gives enterprises, MSPs and IT providers total control of not only their backup environments but also their storage destinations. Comet offers protection for entire disks and partitions on Windows and files and folders for Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms. It also offers application backup for Office 365, Microsoft Hyper-V, SQL Server, MongoDB, among others.
Key Differentiators
- Modern Chunking technology. The Chunking technology powering Comet makes it an effective backup solution. Chunking breaks data into encrypted and compressed chunks, resulting in improved bandwidth and storage efficiency.
- Flexible integrations. Comet’s third-party integrations improve the flexibility of their users by connecting to industry-leading vendors. Using Comet’s API, users can also build out internal capabilities to integrate their Comet Server into their backup environments.
- No full re-uploads. Users do not have to worry about uploading full files in consequent backups as full uploads are only required during the first backup.
Con: Since Comet is based in New Zealand, support hours are a challenge for users in the US.
Choosing the Best Backup Software
To choose the best backup software, you need to consider the quantity of digital and physical resources to be backed up. Secondly, budget and users. What is your budget? How many users do you have in consideration? What features cater to your backup needs? Do the shortlisted backup solutions offer demos? If yes, get a feel of a couple of solutions using the same dataset for better comparison. Regardless of your choice of backup software, the most important takeaway is to ensure that your data is always backed up.
