Update March 2015: Unlimited storage has been discontinued.
Zoolz is an online backup service that promises secure, unlimited, lifetime storage for your files. It does this using “Cold Storage” – low cost storage provided by Amazon Glacier. Basically, it trades retrieval speed for ginormous amounts of space. So you can store lots of data, but you can’t download it very fast. Zoolz also offers “instant storage”, which lets you download files faster, but also costs more.
Unlike other online backup services, Zoolz stores your files forever – long after they’re deleted from your computer. Zoolz also has an easy to use desktop interface, as well as other features which I’ll cover in this review.
From viruses to hard drive crashes, there are constant, daily threats to your data. One of the most important things any computer user can do is back up their data.
Unfortunately, most people don’t think about backups until after files are gone forever.
Fortunately, there’s a lot of great free backup software on the market. No longer are you limited to copying/pasting files through Windows Explorer. All these programs are automatic, easy to use, and best of all – free.
I reviewed 13 of the most popular free backup programs. These are my top 5 recommendations:
#1 – EaseUS Todo Backup Free
EaseUS Todo Backup backs up your entire computer by creating a disk image – an exact copy of your hard drive. You specify which hard drive you want to back up, and it does the rest.
All the backups are incremental, which means only changed files are backed up. This saves valuable space and allows you to store even more backups. It supports scheduling, compression, and email notifications.
It can also back up specific files and folders. Instead of choosing a system backup, just choose a data backup. That way, only the files you choose will be backed up.
To restore files, you can do it through the desktop program, or through a bootable recovery disk. A bootable recovery disk is used if you can’t boot into Windows (as is common with hard drive failures). EaseUS Todo will let you create this recovery disk within the program using a blank CD, DVD, or USB thumb drive.
If you’ve ever used Time Machine for Mac, you’ll have a good idea of what Genie Timeline is like. The free edition takes automatic backups of your files every 8 hours, and puts it on an external USB or network drive.
You can select common areas of your computer to back up, such as Email, My Documents, Pictures, and Office files. Otherwise, you can manually select which files and folders you want to back up.
If you ever need to restore your files, you can use the built-in restore process. Genie Timeline lets you select any point in time to restore data from. You can also pick and choose which files you’d like to restore.
FileFort is a free, lightweight backup program. It can incrementally backup your files and folders. It supports backup destinations such as FTP, CD, DVD, and Blu-ray. It can even backup to online storage services like Amazon S3 or Google Docs.
When creating a backup job, you can choose common presets such as My Documents, Emails, and Pictures. You can also include and exclude certain file types.
SyncBackFree is a file backup and synchronization program. It copies your files from one place to the other. It does this with profiles, which are jobs for the software to run.
It supports both an Easy and Expert mode. The Easy mode is great for new users just learning the program, while the Expert mode unlocks more advanced settings. SyncBackFree supports scheduling, ZIP compression, encryption, logging, and many other features.
It does not support file versioning, which allows you to recover multiple versions of a single file. Instead, I recommend creating separate profiles for daily, weekly, and monthly backups (customized to your liking) as shown in the screenshot. This allows you to recover data from many different points in time.
. These are my top 5 recommendations:
