15 Free backup software

Areca Backup is a personal file backup software developed in Java. It is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.

BackupPC is a free disk-to-disk backup software suite with a web-based frontend. The cross-platform server will run on any Linux, Solaris, or UNIX-based server. No client is necessary, as the server is itself a client for several protocols that are handled by other services native to the client OS. In 2007, BackupPC was mentioned as one of the three most well known open-source backup software, even though it is one of the tools that are "so amazing, but unfortunately, if no one ever talks about them, many folks never hear of them".

Bacula is an open-source, enterprise-level computer backup system for heterogeneous networks. It is designed to automate backup tasks that had often required intervention from a systems administrator or computer operator.

Clonezilla is a free and open-source disk cloning, disk imaging, data recovery, and deployment computer program. Clonezilla is designed by Steven Shiau and developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan. Clonezilla SE provides multicast support similar to Norton Ghost Corporate Edition.

Cobian Backup was a free, donation-supported backup software for Microsoft Windows. It is written in Delphi by Luis Cobian of Umeå University.

DirSync Pro is an open-source file synchronization and backup utility for Windows, Linux and macOS. DirSync Pro is based on the program Directory Synchronize (DirSync), which was first released in February 2003 by Elias Gerber. He subsequently developed it with Frank Gerbig and T. Groetzner. DirSync Pro was released by O. Givi in July 2008, based on a branch of the DirSync code. Many parts of DirSync Pro have gone through major rewriting and redesign ever since.

Duplicati is a backup client that securely stores encrypted, incremental, compressed remote backups of local files on cloud storage services and remote file servers. Duplicati supports not only various online backup services like OneDrive, Amazon S3, Backblaze, Rackspace Cloud Files, Tahoe LAFS, and Google Drive, but also any servers that support SSH/SFTP, WebDAV, or FTP.

FlyBack is an open-source backup utility for Linux based on Git and modeled loosely after Apple's Time Machine.

Mondo Rescue is free disaster recovery software. It supports Linux and FreeBSD (i386). It's packaged for multiple distributions. It also supports tapes, disks, USB devices, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware RAID. Restoration may be done from a physical media including OBDR tape support, or CD/DVD/USB media, or from the network through PXE.

Partclone is a partition clone and restore tool. It provides utilities to back up and restore partitions and is designed for higher compatibility of the file system library. It is developed by the NCHC Free Software Labs in Taiwan. It is the default backup application in Clonezilla, FOG from version 1.00 and Redo Backup and Recovery which is simply a front end to partclone. It supports many file systems and has good performance, as it skips portions of the file system marked as free space.

Partimage is a disk cloning utility for Linux/UNIX environments. Partimage can save partitions in many formats to a disk image. Utilities such as Partimage are useful in a number of situations which are commonly encountered by network administrators as well as advanced computer users who maintain their own systems. The last stable release was in 2010; since then, one of Partimage's authors has worked on FSArchiver, which has broader functionality than Partimage.

Proxmox Backup Server is an open-source, enterprise backup solution supporting virtual machines, containers, and physical hosts. The Bare-metal server is based on the Debian Linux distribution, with some extended features, such as out-of-the-box ZFS support and Linux kernel 5.4 LTS. Proxmox Backup Server is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3.

Rclone is an open source, multi threaded, command line computer program to manage or migrate content on cloud and other high latency storage. Its capabilities include sync, transfer, crypt, cache, union, compress and mount. The rclone website lists supported backends including S3, and Google Drive.

Redo Rescue, formerly Redo Backup and Recovery, is a free backup and disaster recovery software. It runs from a bootable Linux CD image, features a GUI that is a front end to the Partclone command line utility, and is capable of bare-metal backup and recovery of disk partitions. It can use external hard drives and network shares.

rsync is a utility for efficiently transferring and synchronizing files between a computer and an external hard drive and across networked computers by comparing the modification times and sizes of files. It is commonly found on Unix-like operating systems. Rsync is written in C as a single threaded application. The rsync algorithm is a type of delta encoding, and is used for minimizing network usage. Zlib may be used for additional data compression, and SSH or stunnel can be used for security. Rsync is the facility typically used for synchronizing software repositories on mirror sites used by package management systems. It is also one of the fastest ways to delete a large number of files with a binary application, especially when compared to the Linux standard applications rm and find.