Areca Backup: For People Who Want to Know Exactly What Got Backed Up — and How Some backup tools try to hide everything under friendly buttons and simplified workflows. Areca Backup doesn’t. It shows you what it’s doing — every file, every filter, every archive. Nothing happens in the dark. This is a tool for people who actually care what’s getting backed up. And how.

Areca is open-source, no-frills, and file-level. It gives you fine-grained control over versioning, encryption, scripting, and b

FreeFileSync: When Backup Feels Like Overkill, but Syncing Isn’t Not everything needs full-disk imaging or compressed archives. Sometimes, the goal is simpler: make two folders match — exactly — and keep them that way. That’s where FreeFileSync shines. It’s not a backup tool in the traditional sense. It doesn’t zip, encrypt, or version. What it does is mirror. Local to remote. USB to NAS. Laptop to external drive. Real-time, scheduled, or manual — clean, visible, and reversible.

If you know wha

AOMEI Backupper: When You Want Peace of Mind Without Reading the Manual There’s backup software that makes you feel like you’re configuring a rocket launch. Then there’s AOMEI Backupper — the kind that you install, set up in five minutes, and forget about until something goes wrong. Which is kind of the point.

Designed for regular users and IT techs alike, AOMEI focuses on being approachable without giving up control. It backs up whole disks, partitions, files, and even lets you clone your syst

Cobian Backup: When You Just Want a Scheduled, Silent, No-Drama Backup Cobian Backup doesn’t care about looking modern or sounding impressive. It’s quiet, lightweight, and has one job: back up your files on schedule, without a fuss. And it’s really good at it.

It doesn’t clone disks. It doesn’t push to cloud. It doesn’t try to “simplify” things with wizards. Instead, it gives you granular control over what gets backed up, where, when, and how — using compressed archives, incremental logic, and