Review: Squirrelsave backup software

Backup is always important, and backing up files online can be easier than having to sort out your own hard disk archives, and thanks to higher broadband speeds it can be fast as well.

Squirrelsave costs £5 a month for unlimited storage on its servers. To set up the service, you register your details on the website and download the provided software.

After installation, you can either accept the folders it chooses, which include documents, photos, videos and music, or make your own choices of what to back up. This sets the program off backing up the contents of the selection.

Once this first backup is complete, further backups are incremental, meaning only files that change are backed up, so it takes less time.

Initially, backing up all 3GB of data in our chosen folders took the program about 48 hours. Happily, you don’t have to leave your PC turned on the whole time – if you switch off, Squirrelsave will pick up where it left off the next time it starts (it loads itself when Windows starts).

Backed-up files and folders have a conspicuous green tick placed over their icons so you know that they can be recovered if they are lost. Files that haven’t been backed up are marked with an orange cross.

If you want to add or remove a file from your backup you simply right-click it and select the appropriate option on the Squirrelsave menu that appears. Usefully, it can also restore previous versions of files that have been overwritten, provided that the original version was backed up when it was created.

There’s no indication that a specific file’s backup is currently in progress, as happens with its rival Carbonite, however.

Squirrelsave didn’t slow down our test computer, which meant we hardly noticed it running in the background. Although it is more expensive than Carbonite, which only works with one computer as standard, there’s no limit to the number of PCs that Squirrelsave can back up.

The provided support is not as extensive as it might have been, however – there is no way of contacting the company by phone.