Backup4all Professional, the award-winning backup software

We review Backup4all Professional – an award-winning backup program for Windows that has been installed and used on the International Space Station!

One of the most significant cybersecurity threats right now is ransomware, namely because it’s fairly easy to pull off (or at least trick the victim into thinking they’ve been attacked) and too often, it results in a payoff for the attacker. While a recent report already showed a 250% increase in ransomware attacks over the previous year, other data on ransomware attacks in just the past few years is staggering.

• In a 12-month period between 2015 and 2016, 133 healthcare organizations, 115 financial organizations, and 67 government organizations had ransomware on their networks.
• Ransomware detections by antivirus software increased by 36% in 2016 compared to 2015.
• The average per-victim payday for a ransomware attacker increased by 266% between 2015 and 2017, from $294 to $1,077.
• In January 2016, a victim was hit by ransomware every 20 seconds, but by late September that year, the number of attacks increased to once every 10 seconds.
• One in five small-to medium-sized businesses who followed through with the ransom payment did so for absolutely no reason: they never got their data back. (SOURCE: BITSight)

If Backup4all Professional is good enough for a space station, your PC should be just fine.

Fear

It’s that last bullet point that should strike fear in the hearts of every tech user: it doesn’t matter if you pay up or not, there’s a good chance you’re not getting your access restored. In fact, some pseudo-ransomware (meaning, those bogus con jobs that only lock your screen and make you think you’ve been attacked) have been reported to not be capable of restoring access, as well as one particular form of attack that literally had no unencryption key.

Back up!

For years, security experts have been practically begging tech users to backup all their data, not just because of ransomware but for any number of issues that could result in the loss of access or information. There was a time when that kind of additional protection meant investing in expensive hardware or a pricey cloud-based storage provider, but that’s no longer the only way to go.

Backup4all Professional is a fairly intuitive, free to try solution that works with Windows to compress and encrypt all of your information and files. At the risk of sounding like a snake oil huckster, if it’s good enough for the International Space Station, it’s good enough for your personal or business files.

SSL encryption

This tool allows you to backup to local and network drives with support for SSL encryption, as well as backup solutions for CD/DVD/Blu-ray and other removable media like USB drives, flash drives, external hard drives, and more. It can also backup open or locked files and can automatically perform full, differential, incremental, mirror, and smart backups.

Automatic and customized

Essentially, the ability to perform automatic and customized data backups means the worst that happens in a ransomware attack is you end up buying some new hardware. That might sound a little dismissive given the high-priced investment some make in their tech, but think of it this way: you can hand that money over to a hacker and hope he releases your content (without having copied it and uploaded it online first), or you can put that money towards a tax-deductible purchase of upgraded equipment.

To test out Backup4all Professional’s 30-day free trial, you can find the download and technical specs here.