Cobian Backup 11
Easy to get along with, and tremendously speedy – the only catch with this free suite is the lack of support
SCORE
PRICE Free from cobiansoft.com
This freeware backup client is no longer under active development – the latest version is dated 2012 – but it’s still widely used and works perfectly well under Windows 10.
You don’t have to worry about its archive formats becoming obsolete either because, by default, Cobian Backup simply duplicates your files into a new folder on the destination volume. This makes it unbeatably fast, with our 2GB folder backed up to USB in just 19 seconds. If you prefer, you can enable compression to generate industry-standard ZIP or 7Z files: the latter method is slow but very effective, taking just under nine minutes to process our files, but compressing them down to 1.81GB.
Cobian Backup’s enduring popularity is probably down to the balance it strikes between accessibility and advanced features. The interface is clean and uncluttered, with intuitive icons and a logical layout – it’s a breeze to find your way around. Dig into the job settings, however, and you’ll find options for incremental and differential backups, a highly configurable scheduler and private-key encryption.
There’s no native cloud support with Cobian – for obvious reasons – but you can set a single job to write to multiple locations (including network shares and FTP servers) for one-stop hybrid backup.
Some neat features are tucked away in the menus too. A “Force Full” option allows you to override a job’s scheme settings to make a complete backup right away, while a simple decryptor tool lets you browse and extract files from encrypted archives – a necessary feature because there’s no restore function built into the program itself.
On top of all this, the software features one of the most versatile email notifiers that you will find in a backup suite. You can opt to receive logs (with configurable amounts of detail) or only error warnings, and have them delivered either to a regular schedule or whenever jobs are completed.
What you won’t find in this program is anything that aspires beyond the core task of copying files from one place to another. In particular, there’s no interface for browsing your incremental backups and reviewing old file versions: you just have to hunt through the folders to see what was backed up when.
There’s also no disk imager or recovery media builder, which means Cobian Backup alone won’t rescue you from a complete system failure. Still, if you’re tempted by the idea of an unfussy yet powerful file-backup agent, you’ve nothing to lose by giving it a try.