Home PC Backup software

Home PC Backup ensures that your files and folders are safely backed up to a secure online server. Should the worst happen to the computer at home, restoring the files is a matter of recalling them from the server. There is no limit on the amount of data that can be backed up.

Once installed, the program uses a wizard to determine what to include in the backup. By default, this includes the My Documents folder, files on the desktop, Outlook emails and web bookmarks. Adding extra files and folders to the backup job and restoring files to the PC was simple – the program's design mimics Windows Explorer.

Backup jobs can be scheduled to run on specified days and times, but not automatically when the PC is idle. Instead, Home PC Backup offers what it calls ‘Continuous Data Protection', which does a similar thing, but it only appeared to include changes to files that had been backed up before.

We added a line of text to a Word document that had been previously backed up, and saved our changes. These were reflected in the backed up version just a few minutes later. However, when we added a file to a folder we'd previously told the program to backup, it was not automatically copied – we had to start the job manually.

When we forced our test PC to restart during a scheduled backup job, it did not automatically continue when Windows restarted. Instead, details of the interruption were emailed to us so we could manually resume from where the backup left off.

If the computer is not always online, the program will ask whether you want to resume backing up when it is connected to the internet.

It will store up to 14 revisions of files. This worked well and we found it easy to restore several early versions of a test file.

When compared with some of its rivals, Home PC Backup's interface is less polished and it does not label files to show when they have been successfully backed up.

In its favour, though, is the possibility of subscribing for just one month whereas others require a yearly subscription.

If you'd like to give it a go, a free 15-day trial of Home PC Backup offers 2GB of storage space.