Hard drives are marketed as reliable, but the reality tells a different story. It’s only a matter of time until a hard drive crashes and you lose all your important data if you’re not prepared. And even if your hard drive doesn’t fail due to physical errors, virus attacks, software or user errors, even theft threats intervene increasing exponentially the probability of losing your data.

So why do you need a backup software? In almost every industry it is well known that the cost of prevention is less than the cost of repairing/fixing what went wrong. Even so billions of dollars are lost every year because of data loss. This is why you need backup software, and you need to have your data protected. This way if the inevitable happens, you can easily restore data from your most recent backup.

There are many backup programs out there, so choosing one might be a difficult task. In any case, when you choose a backup application you have to be sure that it will make backing up as easy as possible, so that it won’t be a time consuming process on your side.

What to look for in a backup software

These are some key features that any good backup software should have, in order to ensure proper protection for your data and usability:

• Standard Zip Compression. Whenever your data is compressed by a backup program, it’s important that the format it keeps the data in is not proprietary, so that you can access the information without that particular program too. Since ZIP is one of the most popular archiving format, this is how the backup should be kept.

• Incremental backups. If you back-up regularly, it’s important not to back-up everything each time. This is where the concept of incremental backup proves useful, as it will back-up only what was changed since the last backup.

• Backup job scheduler. This would allow you to set a time and date when to run the backup, and the backup would run automatically. It’s one of the most useful feature as it would let you schedule backups and have backups run unattended.

• Data Encryption. It’s always good and safe to "back-up the backup", meaning to have your backup protected with a password in case you accidentally lose the backup destination.

• Easy to use. The backup software has to be an easy to use interface, so that you won’t lose too much time figuring it out.

• Support and documentation. Support is important, and very important is how often the developers of the backup program release new versions and how they answer customer support questions.

The above features are some of the most important ones when choosing the a backup software, but in order to be sure you have the best backup software that fits your needs you will have to test it yourself. This is why always make sure a free trial is offered. Backup4all is a very popular backup software that offers a 30-day free trial, and passes every requirement from those mentioned above.