Local backup software, old but still good.

Even if we are in the Cloud era I know for sure that a lot of small business or home users around the world still use local backups. It’s not a bad choice if you don’t trust cloud providers or if you’re afraid that someone has access to your data. You still have to protect your documents or media files.

The app I’m presenting today, it’s an old one but a great option to backup your data. Cobian Backup it’s a freeware software that can help you save your data to USB drives, network storage and even FTP servers. It’s working only on Windows Desktop and Servers starting from Windows XP or 2003 until the most recent versions.

The tasks you create can have full, incremental of differential backups of your folders or files. You can schedule as you see fit and compress files with or without encryption. You can also create events that can occur before or after the running task.

The logs level of detail is great showing exactly what the task is doing, having a history for every run and pointing straight to the files it failed to copy, if that’s the case. You can also receive an email report after the tasked stopped.

For small businesses that have an Active Directory infrastructure, Cobian can be used to run with a service AD account so the user does not have control on the location the files are going.

In 2013 the source code was sold but not until recently a new version entered in development. Cobian backup saved me a lot of times from users who deleted their files or were infected with ransomware. If you need it a backup software, give it a shot, you will not regret.