9 Best Online Backup Software I Trust for Fast Recovery in 2026

I evaluated 20+ tools to find the nine best online backup software. These are NinjaOne, IDrive Online and SaaS Backup, Druva Data Security Cloud, Veeam Data Platform, Datto SIRIS, Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, Cove Data Protection, AvePoint Confidence Platform, and NAKIVO Backup & Replication.

I used to trust the green check mark. My backups ran every night, jobs "completed," and I never thought to question it. Then a restore drill ate my entire afternoon, and one folder came back empty.

That's the thing about backup software: you only learn what you bought when your laptop won't turn on, ransomware locks every file, or a server dies overnight. At that moment, only two questions matter: how much data you can recover, and how fast.

I looked at leading online backup tools on the market and judged them based on what actually happens when a system fails, not just the feature list.

Concretely, that meant asking whether the backups are actually running and not just scheduled, how much hands-on attention the tool demands day to day, how fast each one restores, and how the bill climbs as your data grows. To get past the marketing, I leaned on G2 Data, side-by-side product comparisons, and reviews from people who've actually sat through a data restore.

The tools don't all aim at the same user. A few are made for small teams that just want cloud backups to run quietly in the background; others for IT admins protecting servers and a fleet of laptops; and a couple for MSPs handling backups across multiple clients.

9 best online backup software I recommend in 2026

Ten years ago, I'd have called backup straightforward: copy your files to a second location, and copy them back when something broke. Now, that mental model is long gone. “What to back up” depends on where the question is coming from.

A small business might need full system images so a dead laptop can be restored with system settings, operating systems, and all applications. An IT team might need virtual machine snapshots that restart on a new host within minutes. An M365-heavy company might need every Teams channel and SharePoint site protected with item-level recovery.

That's why no single tool wins for everyone, and why my comparison kept coming back to the same fault lines: what each tool can protect, how reliably you can get it back, and how well the backups themselves are locked down. What’s more, ransomware now shows up in 48% of breaches, up from 44% a year earlier. That climb in just a year is why immutable, locked-down copies have become a defining capability of this category.

What I prioritized when evaluating online backup tools

Across G2 Data and hundreds of reviewer accounts, the comparison kept coming back to a few criteria. Here's what I weighed for each tool:

• Built-in restore verification: I prioritized tools that run automated recovery testing: booting backups in an isolated environment, verifying file integrity, or sending screenshot confirmations after each job. Where that isn't built in, I leaned on review patterns showing whether real recoveries succeeded.
• Workload coverage: The category stretches from backing up single laptops to entire data centers, and no tool excels at all of it. I evaluated each platform against the workloads its target audience actually runs: file-level backup for documents, image-based backup for full systems (capturing the operating system, applications, and settings together), virtual machine snapshots for virtualized infrastructure, and SaaS protection for environments like Microsoft 365 and Salesforce.
• Recovery speed: I weighed how fast each tool brings a system back, and whether it offers instant VM spin-up or a local copy to beat cloud-download speeds. The category's whole point is the restore, so a tool that backs up flawlessly but recovers slowly lost ground. This is where RTO and RPO become useful shorthand: how much downtime you can tolerate, and how much recent data you can afford to lose.
• Security and resilience: Ransomware operators often target backup systems to make the recovery path impossible. I also assessed how each tool defends its own backups: immutable storage that can't be deleted or altered, AES-256 encryption applied before data leaves your network, multi-factor authentication on the backup console, and retained version history.
• Automation: A backup tool earns its keep when it disappears into the background. I looked for scheduled jobs that retry on their own, alerts that surface only when human judgment is needed, and dashboards that flag failures on time. I also looked at whether tools used incremental backups well enough to keep routine jobs fast and storage-efficient.
• Ongoing maintenance: Cloud-only platforms need nothing beyond lightweight agents on the machines being protected. Software-based tools assume you'll provide compute and storage, often on a NAS or a dedicated backup server. Appliance-based platforms ship physical hardware to your site. None is better in absolute terms; each fits a different team's appetite for running backup infrastructure.
• Retention and archival: Some data needs to be kept for years, whether for regulatory requirements, legal hold, or simply retrieving a file from three years ago. I weighed how long each tool can retain data, whether retention policies can vary by workload, and how affordable long-term archival storage stays as time stretches out.

Not every platform excels in all of these. The ones on this list consistently perform well where it matters most. The list below contains genuine user reviews from the Online Backup Software category page.

To be included in this category, a solution must:

• Store files and data online or in the cloud
• Integrate with applications or sync with endpoints to back up files
• Provide online access to backup controls

*This data was pulled from G2 in 2026. Some reviews may have been edited for clarity.

1. NinjaOne: Best for IT teams that want backup baked into endpoint management

Most backup tools live in a console of their own, separate from everything else IT runs. NinjaOne takes the opposite approach: its backup sits in the same pane used for patching, monitoring, remote access, and ticketing.

NinjaOne holds a 4.7/5 rating from more than 4,300 reviews and posts the highest overall G2 Score of any tool in this roundup. What stood out across those reviews is that backup wins praise for where it lives, not just what it does: a backup runs into the same stream as everything else, so a failed job report shows up where the team is already looking.

It also helps that there's nothing on-premises to babysit. A lightweight cloud agent covers endpoints and servers, and NinjaOne reviewers report going live within about a month, according to G2 Data.

I paid attention to where the bytes actually land. NinjaOne writes backups to its cloud, hosted on AWS in immutable, AES-256-encrypted storage, and also lets you designate a local disk or NAS. Reviewers running this hybrid cloud-plus-NAS setup describe it working flawlessly, which makes NinjaOne workable for teams holding themselves to a 3-2-1 backup rule.

The pricing model drew more praise than I expected for a premium tool. Backups are incremental and deduplicated, storing only what changed, which keeps the separately billed storage lean. What reviewers singled out is the flexibility of month-to-month terms and the ability to scale endpoint count or backup storage down without a long-term commitment, and no data caps on backups. The verdict I kept seeing: premium, but justified.

Recovery is where NinjaOne earned the gold star from me. Image backups aren't all-or-nothing: reviewers describe restoring an entire machine after a loss, but just as often quickly downloading a single deleted file from a backup without staging a full recovery.

The newest capability, SaaS Backup, added Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace protection with email archiving after NinjaOne acquired Dropsuite in mid-2025. From what I've gathered in recent reviews, it's landing well: users call it an affordable way to protect M365 data, say it connects to their MS environment easily, and like that those backups are monitored from the same alert stream as everything else.

Some G2 reviewers managing larger, segmented fleets note that backup policies can't yet be assigned or excluded for individual endpoints separately; you can't, for example, back up all assigned devices while skipping shared workstations. For teams running uniform policies across their devices, it rarely comes up, and NinjaOne is expanding granular control release by release.

While the platform's pitch is one console, a few reviewers note the SaaS Backup modules aren't yet woven in as tightly as the RMM core. Device backup is strongest for Windows image-based protection, while macOS is positioned more around file-and-folder backup, and Linux file-and-folder backup is still in early access. It’s a natural stage in the product’s expansion with many reviewers generally noting that each release brings the backup experience closer into the broader NinjaOne platform.

Roughly 61% of NinjaOne's reviewers are small businesses and 34% mid-market, concentrated in IT services and managed security, i.e., MSPs and internal IT teams folding backup into the tool they already run everything else with. If your goal is fewer consoles and one place to confirm that backups, patches, and endpoints are all healthy, this is where NinjaOne earns its spot.

What I dislike about NinjaOne:

• Some reviewers managing large, segmented fleets note that backup policies can't yet be assigned or excluded for individual endpoints dynamically. For teams running uniform policies across their devices, this rarely surfaces and even granular control is expanding with each release.
• NinjaOne’s backup coverage is most mature on Windows. macOS is covered through file-and-folder protection, while Linux support is still developing for select distributions. For Windows-heavy or mixed endpoint fleets, the advantage is having backup managed alongside endpoint monitoring, patching, and device workflows in one place.

What G2 users dislike about NinjaOne:

“One of the biggest downsides right now is the lack of granular control around the endpoints backup solution specifically; we'd like to assign or not assign a backup policy to endpoints dynamically, but the solution currently doesn't allow for that. For example, we'd like to enable NinjaOne backup for all 1:1 assigned devices, but exclude shared workstations, but there's no current way to dynamically assign, not assign, or disable the backup solution on any given endpoint. There's also a decrypt cert issues with the macOS version of the NinjaOne Backup solution, but this is being addressed by the developers.”

- NinjaOne review, Conn M.

2. IDrive Online and SaaS Backup, Object Storage e2: Best for affordable, set-and-forget backup for small business

If your backup budget is measured in tens of dollars, not thousands, IDrive Online and SaaS Backup is built for exactly that, and most of its reviewers are living it.

It holds a 4.4/5 across more than 1,900 G2 reviews, 94% of them from small businesses, a segment that runs from 50-person companies down to the solopreneurs and freelancers who fill these reviews. Price comes up again and again in the G2 reviews I analyzed, and the pattern is consistent: affordability isn't a tagline here, it's the reason people choose it. With a 5TB plan under $100 a year , the per-terabyte cost sits among the lowest in the category, and that value is why Storage Capacity is IDrive's highest-rated feature on G2 at 94%, 3 percentage points above the category average. There's also a genuine free plan, which is rare in this category.

From there, the praise gets quieter, in a good way. Reviewers describe defining their backup sets and schedule once, then letting IDrive run unattended in the background. Setup draws the most consistent praise of any single theme: install, pick folders, walk away.

One IDrive account covers more ground than the price suggests. Windows, Mac, and Linux machines, phones, external drives, servers, and NAS all back up under a single login with no per-device fee. Linux support gets specific gratitude, with reviewers calling IDrive a strong alternative on a platform many consumer backup tools skip.

What I found more telling than any feature is the trust. The pattern across hundreds of reviews is the same: backups that ran quietly for years and were intact the day a drive finally died. "Reliable" and "peace of mind" are the words that recur.

That trust traces back to the “restore experience”. Reviewers describe recovering everything after reformatting a PC, pulling individual files back to their original location, and rolling back to earlier versions of a file as a ransomware backstop. Several say recovery confidence is exactly why they moved to IDrive after a previous tool let them down.

On security, IDrive Online and SaaS Backup, Object Storage e2 does more than the basics. Backups are AES-256 encrypted in transit and at rest, and you can set a private encryption key so the data stays unreadable even to IDrive. G2 reviewers handling sensitive data point to backups living in a separate cloud with point-in-time file recovery, the kind of isolation you'd want against account-level compromise.

The trade to plan for is speed at scale. The first full backup and any large restore over the internet can run slow and there's no way to preview a file before downloading it. So, seeding a large library can stretch over days before you're fully protected, and a big recovery may run slowest exactly when you want it fastest. Daily incremental runs aren't affected, though, and IDrive's own answer is IDrive Express service. Reviewers mention the company ships you a physical drive so a first upload or a full recovery moves at disk speed instead of internet speed.

The interface trails the engineering. Reviewers describe the UI as dated, more so on mobile, and while they find IDrive easy to get set up, some say it feels a little clunkier to live in day to day. For users who care more about whether their backups run than how the dashboard looks, it fades into the background fast.

For a small business, a home office, or a solo professional guarding a drive full of work, that combination of broad backup coverage, low effort, and dependable everyday restore at a price built for small budgets, covers most of what they need. The reviews say it delivers.

What I dislike about IDrive Online and SaaS Backup, Object Storage e2:

• Speed on big jobs takes planning. The first full backup and large restores run slow over the wire, though daily incrementals aren't affected and IDrive Express ships a physical drive for bulk moves.
• The interface itself looks dated, particularly on mobile, and can feel a little clunkier to navigate day to day, though users who care more about backups running than dashboard polish stop noticing fast.

What G2 users dislike about IDrive Online and SaaS Backup, Object Storage e2:

“I find it slightly frustrating that after backing something up on IDrive, you can't view a preview or play a video clip without downloading it first. It would be nice to have a feature similar to Google Drive where you can preview files. Also, while the setup was generally user-friendly, the user experience and design could be improved a bit.”

- IDrive Online and SaaS Backup, Object Storage e2 review, Sam B.

3. Druva Data Security Cloud: Best for mid-market-to-enterprise teams with a SaaS-heavy, remote workforce

If your IT team would rather not own backup infrastructure, Druva Data Security Cloud is built exactly for that: nothing to install, patch, or maintain. And it's squarely a mid-market and enterprise tool, with more than nine in ten reviewers coming from those segments, drawn by enterprise-grade protection across endpoints, SaaS, and data-center workloads without anything to run yourself.

It holds a 4.7/5 across more than 700 G2 reviews, and what's striking for me is that, despite being an enterprise-grade tool, its power isn't buried under complexity. The loudest praise it receives is about ease: a majority of the reviews I analyzed mention simplicity or some version of "it just works." The G2 Satisfaction Scores back it, with ease of use, quality of support, and meets requirements all in the mid-90s, five-plus points above the category average.

The reason is architectural. Delivered as SaaS, Druva leaves you no backup servers or storage to maintain, and reviewers describe setup as quick and daily operation as hands-off. Day to day, the most common verdict is that you set the backup policy and stop thinking about it. For a platform protecting thousands of endpoints, that absence of infrastructure is the differentiator.

The obvious worry with a no-infrastructure tool is that it may be slow. I went looking for that in the G2 reviews, and large organizations describe protecting endpoints for local and remote staff, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce, next to VMware, NAS, and databases, from a single console instead of stitching tools together. Reviewers mention a consistent backup experience across all of it, and Scheduled Backups is its highest-rated feature on G2, at 96%.

Because the backups are air-gapped and immutable in Druva's cloud, a ransomware attack that encrypts your environment can't reach them, with ransomware protection and end-to-end encryption built in rather than bolted on. It resonates in the regulated sectors Druva's reviewers come from: healthcare, manufacturing, and construction are among its most represented industries. G2 reviews praise Druva Data Security Cloud for its immutable backup, and this is evident in the 96% score the tools obtains for its security standards.

Recovery comes up in several reviews, and the tone is consistent: file-level restores are simple, full restores are fast, and whole machines come back easily. Druva users on G2 highlight that the platform has a low operational effort and a high recovery confidence.

Support and customer-success engagement come up across many of the reviews I analyzed, and the tone is specific: knowledgeable help during setup, responsiveness in critical situations, and quarterly check-ins that surface new features and keep accounts tuned. For a tool you're trusting with recovery, that ongoing attention is part of what you're buying.

You pay by consumption, so the bill climbs with how much you protect and how long you keep it, and some reviewers note the credit model takes time to fully understand. Druva appears to know it: many reviewers describe customer success managers flagging high credit usage and helping optimize it down, so teams with long retention aren't watching it alone.

Another thing to weigh is reporting depth. Druva’s built-in dashboards cover day-to-day visibility well, but they don't always drill down far enough for complex or compliance-driven reporting, and teams with heavy audit requirements sometimes export to a BI platform to get the granular views they need. For most teams and routine oversight, though, the default dashboards are clear and more than enough.

So here's how I'd read Druva. If your team is distributed, leans on SaaS, and would rather not run backup infrastructure at all, Druva Data Security Cloud removes that burden completely. It's for mid-market and enterprise organizations, especially compliance-bound ones, that would rather buy recoverability than build it and can justify paying for the certainty.

What I dislike about Druva Data Security Cloud:

• Consumption pricing means the bill grows with the volume and retention time, so teams that keep data indefinitely should watch usage. G2 reviewers note Druva's own team helps tune it.
• The console covers day-to-day backup status well and becomes familiar quickly. Teams in complex or compliance-driven environments may find the built-in reporting stops short of the drill-downs they need, with some exporting to a BI platform; for routine oversight, the defaults are sufficient.

What G2 users dislike about Druva Data Security Cloud:

“What I dislike most about Druva Data Security Cloud is that some areas feel less flexible than you would expect from an otherwise modern, cloud-native platform.

The biggest example is reporting and customization. While the default dashboards are useful, they don’t always go deep enough for more complex environments or compliance-driven reporting needs. In those cases, you often end up exporting data and building your own reports outside the platform, which adds extra steps and reduces efficiency.”

- Druva Data Security Cloud review, James D.

4. Veeam Data Platform: Best for teams with heavy on-prem or hybrid infrastructure

Where Druva's pitch is to own no infrastructure, Veeam Data Platform’s is the opposite: you own it, and Veeam protects all of it. It holds a 4.6/5 rating across more than 700 reviews, and the first thing I’d point to is that local backup is its highest-rated feature on G2 at 95%, 7 points above the category average, the clearest sign this tool is built for infrastructure you run yourself.

That shows up in who reviews it: government, hospitals, and financial services teams alongside IT services, organizations that run their own data centers and, often for regulatory reasons, need backup and recovery in their own hands. 80% of G2 reviewers deploy Veeam on-premises, and that's exactly who should weigh it.

What it protects is the whole point: VMware and Hyper-V VMs, physical servers, NAS, and workstations, with copies tiered off to cloud or object storage. Reviewers with mixed estates describe Veeam as the one vendor covering Windows and Linux, virtual and physical, on-prem and cloud without gaps.

The capability I kept coming back to in the reviews is that all of it runs from a single console. G2 reviewers describe managing every workload from one place, with no siloed tools, monitoring status, setting policies, and triggering restores across virtual, physical, and cloud from the same dashboard. For an estate this broad, that consolidation is a large part of why people stay.

The other half is reliability. People who've run it for years say they open the dashboard only to confirm every job succeeded.

Recovery comes up across a majority of the reviews I analyzed, with two named capabilities doing the work: instant recovery, which boots a failed machine from backup rather than waiting on a full restore, and replication, which keeps a standby copy ready. G2 reviewers describe disaster recovery as faster and, in one's words, stress-free because of the pair.

For the regulated teams above, the draw is immutable, ransomware-resistant storage built in. Reviewers repeatedly pair "fast recovery" with "immutable backups" as the reason Veeam is their last line of defense.

Veeam is also the most established tool on this list with a G2 market-presence score of 97 on 100. For a buyer that means the platform is widely deployed and comes with deep documentation, community support, and no shortage of admins who already know it, plus the confidence it isn't going anywhere.

Reviewers say setup and configuration take time and research to get right, particularly in larger environments, and a few call the learning curve steep. Many reviews are also consistent about the other side: once configured, it runs quietly, and teams that staff it properly describe the advanced features as earning their keep.

The licensing is the other thing I'd go in with eyes open. Reviewers say it's hard to see through pricing: it's per workload, cloud storage is billed on top, and several advanced features sit behind extra licenses, so the total is tough to work out upfront. The reviewers who've mapped it with a reseller say it settles into something predictable; the friction is in getting there.

Veeam is for businesses that want to run their own backup and have the skill to do it well, across an on-prem or hybrid estate where breadth and control matter more. Put in the time to learn it and staff it, and the reviews are emphatic about the payoff.

What I dislike about Veeam Data Platform:

• Setup and troubleshooting reward expertise and time. For teams with the skills to run it, reviewers are emphatic that it then runs quietly and recovers reliably.
• Licensing takes work to figure out. Reviewers note it's billed per workload, with cloud storage on top and advanced features behind extra licenses, which makes the total tough to predict upfront. Once teams map it out, the per-workload model gives them precise control over what they pay for, and reviewers say it settles into a predictable cost that earns its keep.

What G2 users dislike about Veeam Data Platform:

“I find that the initial setup and licensing model can be a bit complex, especially for new users or smaller environments. Some advanced features require time and experience to fully understand and configure correctly. Additionally, the platform can be resource-intensive, so it needs proper planning to ensure optimal performance.”

- Veeam Data Platform review, Tsepang N.

5. Datto SIRIS: Best for MSPs providing full disaster recovery to small businesses

Most tools on this list answer "is my data backed up?" Datto SIRIS answers a harder question: when a client's server dies, how fast can you get them working again?

That shift from backup to business continuity is the whole point, and the reviews prove it's not marketing: continuity and disaster recovery come up in several G2 reviews I analyzed, and almost all come from MSPs and the IT-services firms protecting other companies' data. Datto SIRIS holds a rating of 4.6/5 across more than 280 reviews.

Here's how it earns that. SIRIS is a local appliance that takes image-based backups and replicates a copy to Datto's cloud, so every client site has a fast local restore point and an offsite copy that survives anything that happens to the building.

When a server goes down, the MSP boots it as a virtual machine, on the appliance or in the cloud, and the client keeps working while the original is rebuilt. G2 reviewers describe instant virtualization saving them on more than one occasion, including when physical infrastructure was entirely unavailable, and it shows in the scores: Disaster recovery is among its highest rated features on G2 at 95%, well above the category average.

The capability I'd single out happens before disaster strikes. After each backup, SIRIS boots the image overnight and captures a screenshot proving it starts. Reviewers say this instills confidence the backups are genuinely bootable and spares them from running separate recovery checks. It's the one tool here where verification is built in rather than left to you.

The same machinery covers the worst case. Reviewers describe restoring systems after ransomware as straightforward, with the cloud copies immutable, unable to be deleted out from under you. For an MSP that's guaranteed a client's uptime in writing, that proof is exactly what let’s them sign Datto with confidence.

Running it across a fleet is the part MSPs describe as the quiet win: one portal covers every client, alerts are dependable, and reviewers say backup issues are rare enough that the dashboard check becomes routine.

The consideration reviewers raise more than any other is cost. SIRIS bills as an ongoing subscription that scales with storage and retention and it runs high for smaller environments. What keeps it the MSP favorite anyway is the alternative: assembling turnkey, proven continuity from parts yourself. The trade I keep seeing in the reviews is the same: it costs more, and it earns that the day a client would otherwise be down.

Support is the place to set expectations. Reviewers praise the help they get in a genuine emergency, while some also find routine escalations slower or harder to route, particularly during busy periods. For a team that has the product dialed in, day-to-day reliance on support is low enough.

If your pitch to clients is genuine business continuity rather than just backup, and they can absorb the premium that buys, SIRIS is built for that.

What I dislike about Datto SIRIS:

• While pricing is a premium you pay continually, G2 reviewers are consistent that it earns the day a client would otherwise be down. SIRIS sits among the priciest ways to do BCDR and yet it remains MSPs favorite for the value.
• Support can feel uneven outside of urgent recovery moments, especially routine escalations routed during busy periods. Reviewers still praise the help they get in genuine emergencies, which is the support moment that matters most for a BCDR tool like SIRIS.

What G2 users dislike about Datto SIRIS:

“Cost can be on the higher side compared to other backup solutions, especially for smaller environments. The interface, while functional, can feel a bit dated and not always intuitive for advanced tasks. Some restore operations and reporting could be more streamlined, and troubleshooting can occasionally require support involvement.”

- Datto SIRIS review, Donovan E.

6. Cove Data Protection: Best for cloud-first backup for multiple clients

Cove Data Protection is a cloud-first backup service: you install the software, it sends backups straight to N-able's cloud and there's no hardware to run. Its reviewer base on G2 sits firmly at the small-business end of the market (76%), concentrated in IT services and network security, the opposite end of the market from the enterprise-heavy tools earlier on my list (like Druva). Many of those reviewers are MSPs protecting backups across multiple clients or sites, the use case Cove is built for.

On G2, it holds a 4.5/5 across more than 430 reviews. Reviewers consistently credit how light it runs on client machines, which is the practical payoff of its engine, TrueDelta. This is Cove's incremental method that sends only the sub-block changes, sized to run as often as every 15 minutes without choking a client's bandwidth.

Those backups land immutable in Cove's cloud, isolated from the client's network, so ransomware on a client machine can't follow them. Primary storage is included in the price rather than billed separately, which keeps the per-client math predictable.

One dashboard covers servers, workstations, and Microsoft 365 across every client, with Google Workspace backup newly in limited preview, starting with Gmail and Drive. Reviewers managing many tenants describe filtering and searching across clients and scenarios as simple, with custom profiles and retention policies per client.

Recovery comes up across a majority of the G2 reviews I analyzed, and the everyday cases dominate the praise: an accidentally deleted email pulled back in seconds, a file or folder returned without drama, and full-image recoveries reviewers describe as consistently smooth. That emphasis on the small, frequent recoveries matters, because those are what most teams actually run day to day, far more often than a full-site disaster, and Cove turns them around from the same dashboard.

Automated recovery testing then boots each backup to confirm it will actually restore, so recoverability is verified rather than assumed. Reviewers running disaster-recovery drills describe them working perfectly. For an MSP protecting many clients at once, that automatic check is what surfaces a silent backup failure early, before a client actually needs to recover.

Everyday recoveries run fast; the trade-off arrives at scale. Because backups live in the cloud, restoring a lot of data at once is only as fast as your internet. Cove's answer to that is an optional local copy that restores at LAN speed, an extra setup on hardware you supply.

Most reviewers find Cove dependable run after run. Occasional failed or missed backups do surface, which requires a periodic dashboard check rather than pure set-and-forget. For an MSP already doing a morning sweep across clients, that's routine, but for a team wanting zero-touch, it’s something to keep in mind.

For an IT team or MSP that wants backup across a lot of machines or clients to run, quietly and affordably, with no rack of hardware to maintain, Cove is the lighter, more flexible way to protect many sites at once.

What I dislike about Cove Data Protection:

• Everyday recoveries, single files, mailboxes, the occasional "oops" deletion, come back quickly. Pulling a full machine or a large dataset over the internet can take longer, something users with bigger environments note, though sites that add Cove's optional local copy restore at LAN speed and rarely feel it.
• Most reviewers find the backups dependable month after month. Occasional failed or missed jobs do surface, and some note the error messages name a problem without always suggesting the fix. A quick periodic check keeps it a non-issue.

What G2 users dislike about Cove Data Protection:

“One downside of Cove Data Protection is the error page. The backup error page lists errors that have occurred during backups, and gives me a reason for failure, but there is no potential solution to this issue. I have to copy the error, and paste it into google, often recommending me sites that aren't N-able's support page.”

- Cove Data Protection review, Vincent N.

7. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage: Best for low-cost, immutable offsite copies of your backups

Good backup practice ends with a copy that lives offsite and can't be touched, so a fire or theft can't take it and ransomware can't encrypt your last line of defense along with everything else. The catch is that the copy has to be low-cost enough that teams actually keep it, and in my reading that's the single clearest reason Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage belongs on this list.

It holds a 4.6/5 across 110+ G2 reviews, 72% from small businesses, and the praise is unusually concentrated: price dominates the reviews I analyzed, raised by the overwhelming majority of them. Reviewers, mostly IT and software teams, reach for the same two words: affordable, and reliable for years. It's S3-compatible object storage at a fraction of what the big clouds charge.

That S3 compatibility is what makes it practical: it imitates the standard so faithfully that reviewers describe pointing any S3-aware tool at it with a config change, not a migration, which also means you're never locked into one vendor's backup app. Because S3 is the default language of backup and storage software, B2 slots in behind tools teams already run, from Veeam to MSP360, without re-architecting anything. Also, since your data sits in a standard format, you're never locked into one vendor.

The way SMBs actually use it is as the offsite layer behind a backup tool: live machines run through software with native scheduling, and the archival copies route to B2. Reviewers describe pointing B2 buckets at a NAS or a Veeam job and simply forgetting about it. In practice it becomes the "one offsite copy" of the 3-2-1 rule, the part teams most often skip because cloud storage gets pricey, and B2 is affordable enough that keeping that copy stops being a budget decision.

What stood out when I cross-referenced the Online Backup Grid Report is that the features that genuinely belong to B2 as a backup storage tool score strongly: storage capacity at 98% against a 91% category average, remote backup at 96% versus 91%, and versioning at 95% versus 89%. Those are exactly the things a storage target lives on, holding a lot of data, taking it in reliably from offsite, and keeping earlier versions. The scores say B2 isn't just an affordable pick, it's strong where the job is.

The security architecture earns its spot in a ransomware-era stack: Object Lock makes copies write-once, so an attacker who reaches your environment can't alter or delete the offsite copy. A locked backup can't be purged before its retention window expires, which closes the gap ransomware crews aim for when they go after backups first. That immutability is what turns "a copy elsewhere" into actual insurance.

The reliability claims come with tenure attached. G2 Reviewers describe five-plus years of the same buckets quietly receiving backups, with the data intact whenever they've needed it. For a product whose whole job is to sit in the background until the day something breaks, that long record of being unremarkable is a strong endorsement.

One thing worth saying upfront: B2 is storage, not a backup application, so it does not handle backup scheduling, restore workflows, alerts, or monitoring on its own. That makes it less natural for teams that want one all-in-one backup console, but a strong fit for teams already using backup software that need simple, affordable cloud storage behind it.

For most teams, Backblaze B2 stays quietly in the background, especially when they access it through their backup software. Reviewers often describe that as part of the appeal: once configured, there is little day-to-day management required. A few who frequently manage files directly in the UI say browsing can become slow on the web once a bucket grows large, something occasional visitors are unlikely to run into.

Where B2 fits is as the storage layer you control: the affordable, durable, immutable offsite home for backups. If you've already got the backup software and just need somewhere reliable and inexpensive to keep the copies safe, that's exactly the job it's built for.

What I dislike about Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage:

• B2 is cloud storage, not a full backup app, so scheduling, restore workflows, alerts, and monitoring depend on the backup tool you pair with it. That makes it less suited to teams wanting one all-in-one backup console, but a strong fit for teams that already have backup software and need affordable storage behind it.
• Day to day, B2 asks for almost no attention. Some users note the web console itself looks dated and can feel slow when browsing larger buckets, which matters mainly for teams working in the UI directly.

What G2 users dislike about Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage:

"Browsing data stored in Backblaze B2 could be improved, it was slow and a bit cumbersome."

- Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage review, Scott B.

8. AvePoint Confidence Platform: Best for M365 heavy businesses needing backup plus governance

AvePoint is the odd one out on this list. The G2 reviews make clear the AvePoint Confidence Platform is bought as much for data-governance as for backup, and for the right buyer that distinction is the point: it covers whether the data is backed and restorable, and also who can reach it, how is it governed, and is it compliant.

It holds a 4.5/5 rating across 120+ reviews, and security and compliance is its highest-rated feature on G2 (at 95%), which tracks for a tool bought as much for governance as for backup. While it’s focused on teams living in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, it also backs up Google Workspace, Salesforce, and Dynamics 365.

Reviewers describe it as bringing data protection, governance, security, and compliance together in one place instead of juggling separate tools, as a single pane for backups and cloud governance. The numbers back them: Security and Compliance is its highest-rated feature on G2, and it carries the certifications regulated industries look for, including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and HITRUST.

The backup itself is the real thing, not a governance afterthought. Reviewers call the Microsoft 365 coverage comprehensive and reliable across Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, with automated schedules they set once. That completeness matters because the common trap with M365 is assuming Microsoft already protects your data end to end. AvePoint covers every core service rather than a subset, so no workload is quietly left uncovered.

What surprised me evaluating the reviews is that the depth doesn't make it slow. Ease shows up across a majority of the G2 reviews I analyzed, with reviewers calling the platform reliable and intuitive from day one. For a platform this broad, none of that is a given. Governance suites tend to get heavy and admin-hungry as modules pile up, yet reviewers say AvePoint stays approachable even as they switch more of them on.

Restores draw the same tone: fast, simple to run, and granular enough to navigate down to the individual item, a single site, channel, or mailbox, including recovering accidental deletions without touching anything else. For an M365 admin that item-level precision is the everyday win, since most recovery requests are a single deleted mailbox or file rather than a full-tenant rebuild, and pulling just that back saves hours over restoring everything.

Support earns its own mentions, and the pattern is partnership: guided initial setup that reviewers describe as easy with help on hand, and vendor support they rate as solid long after go-live. For a platform with this many moving parts, hands-on onboarding is what gets teams to value faster, and reviewers note the relationship doesn't taper off once the contract is signed.

AvePoint’s strongest value shows up when backup recovery is part of a broader data protection strategy that also includes governance, compliance, and resilience layer. For teams that only want straightforward cloud-to-cloud backup, the quote-based model and broader feature set may feel a lot to justify. For organizations that need those extra controls, the added scope becomes the whole reason to choose.

Finding your way around it takes patience. Some reviewers say module naming conventions are difficult to remember, which is why implementations often lean on AvePoint's professional services, a help reviewers rate well. Once configured, day-to-day use is the part people call easy.

AvePoint earns its keep for the organization that treats data governance and compliance as a core requirement. If you're answerable for how your data, spread across Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce, is retained and protected, and if it’s held to the same rules everywhere, it's built for that.

What I dislike about AvePoint Confidence Platform:

• Pricing reflects the governance platform underneath, and the bill climbs as advanced compliance modules switch on. Its value is clearest when backup is tied to governance, compliance, retention, and broader SaaS resilience; if you just need basic cloud-to-cloud recovery, a simpler tool may feel easier to justify.
• Getting oriented takes time. Some reviewers find module naming unclear and the breadth complex at first, leaning on AvePoint's well-rated professional services to stand it up. Once configured, the running of it is what reviewers call easy.

What G2 users dislike about AvePoint Confidence Platform:

“One thing I've found tricky with the AvePoint Confidence Platform is that some of the naming conventions across features and modules can be a bit unclear or inconsistent, making it harder to navigate and get started than it should be."

- AvePoint Confidence Platform review, Stefan N.

9. NAKIVO Backup & Replication: Best for budget-conscious SMBs and MSPs backing up VMs and servers

NAKIVO is the value entry on this list: a 4.7/5 across more than 350 reviews, among the highest rated-tools here. It's built for budget-conscious SMBs and MSPs that need to back up VMs and servers without enterprise pricing.

Backup tools tend to specialize in what they protect: your files and devices, your SaaS apps, or the servers your business runs on. NAKIVO's center of gravity is the last one: production infrastructure, the virtual machines and physical servers running your applications and databases. It rounds that out with Microsoft 365 and file-share backup, so a small team can protect its server room and its M365 from one tool, at a price a small operation can absorb.

What surprised me is how little it asks of you to start. There's no dedicated backup server to stand up: it installs on Windows, Linux, a VMware virtual appliance, or straight onto a NAS. One of the most common setups reviewers describe is running it off a Synology or QNAP NAS they already owned, and G2 reviewers report getting up and running, even across multiple hosts and NAS units, within a couple of hours.

Admins who've spent years on the heavyweight enterprise platforms describe NAKIVO's install as straightforward by comparison, and it shows in the G2 Data: one of the fastest go-live time of any tool in this roundup. For a small team, that speed is more than just convenience. It means you're actually protected within a day or two instead of weeks, and you're not paying for consulting hours just to stand the thing up.

From a single console it covers the major hypervisors, VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, and Proxmox, plus physical Windows and Linux servers, Microsoft 365, and file shares. That one-console breadth is what reviewers mean when they call it good value: one tool, one bill, for a mixed estate. It also means a small team doesn't need a specialist for each platform or a stack of point tools to protect a room that mixes VMs, physical servers, and M365, which is the kind of setup smaller shops typically run.

Reviewers also describe putting copies exactly where they want them: daily backups to local NAS storage with weekly copies off to S3-compatible cloud storage, configured from the same console, with backup immutability available for the ransomware case. That flexibility lets a small team keep a local copy for fast restores and an offsite one for disaster, without bolting on extra products. So, even when a ransomware hit reaches the network, it can't quietly delete the backups.

The note that recurs most, though, is support, which is an unusual positive for a budget tool. Customer support comes up across a majority of the G2 reviews I analyzed, and NAKIVO scores 95% for quality of support on G2, 8 percentage points above the category average. Reviewers describe chat responses that are fast and genuinely expert, and onboarding sessions that get teams unstuck rather than generic replies.

While the console is quick to learn, and reviewers find it easy to navigate day to day, some reviewers note the design feels dated and can slow when many jobs run at once. For the budget-conscious teams NAKIVO is built for, a less modern interface is usually a trade they've made on purpose.

For routine work, the product and documentation usually cover what teams need. The tradeoff is ecosystem depth: NAKIVO has fewer third-party guides and consultants than larger, more widely deployed vendors, so unusual scenarios often route through its own customer team. Given its strong support scores, that direct support path feels less like a gap and more like the practical way edge cases get resolved.

It fits the team that's content to run its own backup across virtual and physical workloads, wants the bill predictable, and isn't choosing on brand name or feature count.

What I dislike about NAKIVO:

• The console is quick to learn and easy to navigate, which reviewers credit while a few noting the design looks dated and can feel slower when many jobs run at once. That matters mostly to teams who live in dashboards rather than just checking in on them.
• NAKIVO has a smaller user base than the big-name platforms, so when you search for help, you'll find fewer guides, forum threads, and consultants who know it. In practice, that means leaning on NAKIVO's own support team more often, and their support is among its highest-rated areas on G2.

What G2 users dislike about NAKIVO:

“If there is a downside, it would be the long wait when restoring a particular file from weeks ago. It can take quite some time to restore, for example, a backed-up file of 30 GB. However, since I was using the free version and I’ve experienced the support team’s technical expertise and knowledge, I’m confident I could achieve much better results.”

- NAKIVO review, Arjan B.

Comparison of the best online backup software

Free-plan and free-trial details were verified from product pages in July 2026.

Frequently asked questions about online backup software

Have more questions? Find more answers below.

Q1. What's the best online backup service for a small business?

IDrive. It runs quietly in the cloud, backs up every computer, phone, and drive into one account, and starts free (paid plans from about $70 a year). You get versioning, private-key encryption, and dependable protection without enterprise pricing or setup.

Two others, reviewers describe as cost-effective are worth a look depending on your setup: NAKIVO if you're backing up your own servers and VMs on a budget, and Cove Data Protection platform if you're an MSP protecting many client sites, since storage is included in the price with no hardware to rack.

Q2. Which online backup provider is the most cost-effective?

IDrive is the value leader for most small teams: low annual cost, broad multi-device coverage, private-key security, and 30 file versions, with a genuine free tier and no enterprise pricing. For backing up servers and VMs instead, NAKIVO delivers similar value per workload, and Backblaze B2 is the cheapest way to keep offsite copies behind a backup tool you already run.

Q3. What's the best backup software for large enterprises?

Druva Data Security Cloud for fully cloud-native organizations: nothing to install or maintain, immutable backups, and clean scaling across endpoints, Microsoft 365, and data-center workloads. Veeam Data Platform suits enterprises with mixed virtual, physical, on-prem, and cloud estates, with immutable backups and instant recovery under one platform, though it expects the expertise to run it.

Q4. What's the most secure online backup solution for a startup?

Druva Data Security Cloud is the one I'd trust a startup's data to. It’s delivered as SaaS, leaves no backup server to harden or patch, the copies sit air-gapped and immutable so ransomware can't reach them, and with AES-256 encryption plus SOC 2 and HIPAA certifications it posts some of the strongest security marks on G2 of any cloud-native tool. If the budget is tighter, IDrive is the leaner alternative, with private-key encryption that keeps data unreadable even to IDrive at a fraction of the cost.

Q5. What's the best data backup service for software development?

NAKIVO. Your code already lives in Git. What actually needs protecting is the infrastructure you run yourselves: build servers, test VMs, the Linux and Proxmox boxes dev shops lean on, which plenty of backup tools don't cover. NAKIVO backs all of it from one console, installs straight onto Synology or QNAP NAS you already have, and bills per workload. G2 reviewers keep flagging how fast it is to get running as it posts the fastest go-live time in this roundup.

Q6. What's the top-rated cloud backup app for IT companies?

NinjaOne posts the highest overall G2 Score in this category and folds backup into the same console IT uses for patching, monitoring, and remote access, so a failed backup shows up next to every other alert. For MSPs delivering full disaster recovery to clients, Datto SIRIS is the other strong pick, built to boot a downed client server as a VM in minutes.

Q7. Which app offers the best features for cloud backups?

If you want a backup that simply runs in the cloud with no hardware to babysit, Cove Data Protection is the pick: its TrueDelta engine keeps runs small enough to fire every 15 minutes, storage is included, and automated recovery tests confirm the data will actually restore. For fully cloud-native teams wanting deeper enterprise features, Druva is the richer alternative, protecting endpoints, Microsoft 365, and data-center workloads from one SaaS platform.

Q8. Which software provides the most reliable data backup?

Datto SIRIS is built for continuity, not just backup: every night it boots each backup and screenshots it to confirm the machine will actually start, so you've watched recovery work before you ever need it. Veeam is the other tool reviewers lean on for reliability, with a track record of running for years and restoring cleanly when called on.

Q9. What is the best backup for a Microsoft 365-heavy business?

AvePoint Confidence Platform. If a business genuinely lives in Microsoft 365, this is what I'd reach for: granular, item-level restore across Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange, with governance and compliance on top. The nuance is cost, not capability. A smaller team that only needs basic mailbox restore can spend less elsewhere: IDrive's dedicated Microsoft 365 backup covers the same apps at about $20 per seat a year, solid restore for a simpler shop without paying for a governance suite it won't use.

Test the restore

The one lesson from reading hundreds of these reviews: every tool clears the bar: every one of them backs data up. Where they actually split is what each asks of you to run day to day, and whether you can prove recovery before the morning you depend on it.

So once you've narrowed it to two, don't judge them on the dashboard alone. Judge them on the restore.

Spin up a trial, back up something real, then delete it and bring it back: one file, a whole machine, a full "everything's gone" drill if ransomware is what keeps you up. The tool that returns your data, in full and on time, is your online backup software.

The next step, once you've picked your tool, is making sure it lives inside a recovery plan you've actually tested: Creating an Effective Disaster Recovery Plan