Iperius Backup Full review

Small businesses that don’t secure their critical data can’t use lack of choice as an excuse. There’s a huge range of backup software products on the market, and Italian vendor Iperius now provides another package to add to the list, aiming to stand out with a solid combination of features, ease of use and value.

The free version of Iperius Backup supports all versions of Windows Server, as well as Windows XP upwards. This offers full and incremental backups to destinations such as local drives, RDX, USB and NAS shares, and has no limits on the number of sources or destinations.

Of more interest to businesses will be the Full version, which also includes disk imaging for disaster recovery, backup synchronisation and VSS open file backup. There’s also support for Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, FTP servers and Iperius’ own cloud storage as destinations, and it can secure SQL databases. It also supports tape drives.

It took only a minute to install Iperius Backup on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host; we set it to run as a service. The main interface is sparse, but its simplicity makes light work of creating backup jobs.

You start by defining backup sources, which can be local or networked files and folders, FTP servers or SQL databases. Next, you choose a destination, with choices ranging from local or remote folders and tape drives to cloud storage and FTP servers.

Each job can be run as a full backup or a regular incremental in which only new or modified files are copied. It’s also possible to opt for a full backup followed by regular incrementals and decide on the number of file versions to keep.

Iperius offers plenty of control over the backup process. Jobs can include system files; you can use VSS to secure open or locked files; pre- and post-backup jobs can be run; and the host system can be closed down or rebooted after the backup has finished.

To test it, we created backups of local and networked files and folders, then secured them to both local drives and a mapped share on a Synology NAS appliance over 10GbE. The latter averaged 133MB/sec while securing a 22.4GB folder. To use Dropbox, we created a new API app, then entered the key and secret into the backup job. Using Iperius’ own AES-encrypted cloud backup system is just as simple; pricing for the service starts at £32 per year for 50GB.

A Tandberg RDX USB drive was accepted as a backup destination, as was our HP LTO-6 SAS tape drive. LTO-6 performance is modest, however: securing the same 22.4GB test folder of 10,500 files from a NAS share over 10GbE averaged only 50MB/sec; CA’s ARCserve Backup r16 returned 165MB/sec with the same test.

The software has limitations, the biggest of which is that Iperius doesn’t provide agents for remote systems. To create Windows drive images for disaster recovery, you need a paid-for installation on each system and a Windows 7 recovery disk to hand for the restore. For Hyper-V backup, you can copy VHD files using the free version, but if you want VSS hot backups of running VMs, you’ll need at least the Essential version installed on the Hyper-V host. For Exchange, you can copy database files after shutdown, but there are no facilities for data-store or mailbox backup. You’ll also need a paid-for local installation to secure Outlook PST files using VSS.

The web console comes in handy for managing multiple installations. After you’ve registered each copy, Iperius’ cloud portal can be used to run existing jobs manually, view logs or view the current status of your backups.

Restoring files is as simple as using Explorer to drag and drop. Iperius also provides tools for restoring from ZIP files, tape drives and database backups, plus an FTP client for browsing your cloud storage. They’re all easy to use, but Iperius doesn’t retain any records of restore operations.

Iperius Backup Full scores well for ease of use and has support for a variety of different backup destinations, including cloud storage services. It’s a good-value choice for protecting a single server, but Exchange support is basic, and the lack of client agents means it will become expensive if you want disaster recovery for multiple systems.