The best cloud backup for small business in 2024: These tools will help you backup your bluishness data and keep you protected from potential threats.
In some cases, these tools also help with legal issues and requirements. As a small business, you may not have an IT staff, most of these tools do not require one. They’re extremely easy to understand, use and manage.
Without wasting time, let’s get started eh?
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How to choose best cloud backup for small business?
The easy way out? Just go with Acronis Cyber Protect or CrashPlan.
But, I’d like you to be able to make these decisions on your own. What exactly should you look for in the best small business cloud backup tool? What makes one of these better than the others?
Let’s go over some of the basics first eh?
- Device compatibility: as a small business, you certainly use more than just a laptop to get things done. It’s best to go with backup solutions which support mobile phones, NAS, and other devices you may be using.
- Ransomware/malware protection: Over 37% businesses were attacked by ransomware in 2021. This number will only go up and hence you need something that not doesn’t just offer backup, but also protection.
- Datacenter location/choices: It’s best if you get to choose your datacenter location. If you can’t, at least try to get a privacy-friendly location.
- Versioning: It’s just a feature which lets you keep each new change in your backup file as a different “version”. This lets you restore to each change-point instead of you simply having the latest backup.
- Additional users and permissions: as a business you probably have a few employees. It’s better if you can add users to your backup software and grant them specific levels of access, isn’t it?
- Legal features: This isn’t a must and not all tools offer this. However, if your backup tool offers legal compliances, retention of sensitive files and breadcrumbs it’s a nice plus.
- Pricing: It’s best to spend a few extra bucks andget the better tool than to save a few bucks and lose data worth thousands of dollars and hours.
- End-to-End encryption: This is the best kind of protection out there. E2E would guarantee that no one, not even the backup company can access your data even if they wanted to.
- Other backup-specific features: You can also look for basic features such as scheduling, incremental/differential/continuous backups/remote backup management etc.
While this isn’t “everything”, I’m sure you’ve got an idea by now. Haven’t you? Let’s get you that cloud backup solution for small business you came here for.
1. Acronis Cyber Protect
Website: https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/cyber-protect/backup/
Noteworthy features: 
- NAS/mobile devices supported
- User-permissions
- Disk imaging (backing up entire system)
- Tape multiplexing and multistreaming
- Hardcore legal features
- 8 datacenter choices
- Unlimited versioning and users
- Anti malware and ransomware features
- Starting price: $65.00
This is a cloud backups for business that’s built specifically for “businesses”. For starters, it supports “continuous backups”. This means work is saved almost in real-time as changes are made to it.
It also lets you back your entire system up in a single image file! It offers arguably the best recovery time in the industry by letting you run your backup instantly as a Windows or Linux virtual machine.
You can obviously set up different devices and employees (or just friends) and set custom permission levels for each.
There’s an in-built malware scanner. This helps not only keep your backups clean, but restore cleaner versions even if malwares existed on your system.
It also is capable of “saving only newly changed data” while ignoring duplicate that that already exists. It saves space as well as bandwidth.
Tape multiplexing and Tape multistreaming make backups faster by allowing multiple clients and multiple devices to backup simultaneously.
I personally love its legal features. There’s a “data protection map” which keeps you in compliance. There’s another feature which lets you run forensic analysis and keep memory dumps, process information and other such sensitive things in account.
It’s one of the very few small business cloud backup solutions that actually has 8 different datacenters. This means you get to choose the level of privacy (laws) your company or data needs to comply to!
Unlimited versioning, users, scheduling are just some of its other features that your business needs.
A number of you may be using some of the best NAS for small businesses, well, Acronis supports those and even mobile devices.
Despite being extremely feature-rich, it’s one of the cheaper backup solutions on this list. The plans start at $65.00 although depending on the add-ons and other specs, they may vary. Some of the most advanced plans cost $1000+.
2. Uranium Backup
Website: https://www.uranium-backup.com/
Noteworthy features: 
- A free forever plan exists
- Network/ FTP/ Hyper-V and Tape backups
- Incremental/full/scheduled backups
- Phone support
- Remote client management
- Starting price for the paid plan: EUR 80.00/month.
If you need the best small business cloud backup software but for free, Uranium Backup may be worth a peek.
On top of cloud backup, it also supports network backups and FTP backups. This protects you against malware Maybe you’re looking for tape backups (even LTFS mode) or Hyper-V backups (backing up your VM directly from the host)? Those are supported as well.
The software is capable of incremental/ full as well as differential backups. Even SQL servers can be backed up.
If you’re short on time or buried in workload, it even lets you schedule your backups.
They do offer some of the best support in the industry (for paid users). You sure can e-mail them but it’s the phone support which makes them different.
GDPR and other compliances are taken care of as well. It even lets you customize as well as export backup histories.
It even lets you connect multiple clients for backup and manage them remotely!
There’s obviously the free forever plan. However, it doesn’t have the encryption, differential/incremental backups or most other features. To avail those features, the cheapest paid plan starts at €80.00/month.
There are 8 different versions of the software which are basically the different plans you can avail.
3. CrashPlan
Website: https://www.crashplan.com/en-us/
Noteworthy points: 
- Not cheap, $9.99/device.
- Block-level backups
- Deduplication
- Incremental/continuous and scheduled backups
- Web-browser interface supported
- Protection from ransomware
- Lossless data compression
CrashPlan is without doubt one of the best small business cloud backup tools out there.
I’ll be upfront here, it’s on the more expensive side of things. The standard plan is called “Small Business” and starts at $9.99/device. The “per device” cost is what makes it expensive. So, if you’ve multiple devices or would like a cheaper solution, do skip to the next options.
However, in my opinion CrashPlan is more than worth its asking price so you might as well give it a try?
Like most other options here, it too supports AES 256-bit military grade encryption.
You can choose if you want continuous/ incremental or scheduled backups.
It’s not just capable of retaining multiple versions, but, also lets you choose the frequency as well as the duration for these versions should be kept.
It also lets you attach a secondary storage device for your backups, just in case. You can also assign priority levels to files so that the more important files get backed up first.
You can restore your data on the same device you backed up from, to a new device, all you need is a web browser.
As is expected and required from any tool claiming to be best cloud backup for small business, it does protect you against ransomware. Because backups happen every 15 minutes, and multiple previous versions are retained. You can easily recover a much earlier version when your system wasn’t yet affected.
Additionally, CrashPlan uses a separate compartment for each individual device’s data. This means even if one of your devices is compromised, the rest of your data stays safe. Data is stored in “blocks” rather than a single file.
It also uses deduplication which means it doesn’t backup the same file twice, even if there are multiple copies of it on your system. It massively helps save space.
Obviously this is all automated. The backups happen automatically without you having to lift a finger.
It even uses lossless data compression to reduce the file size for your backups without degrading data quality.
4. iDrive
Website: https://www.idrive.com/
Notable features:
- Forever free plan (10 GB)
- Disk cloning
- Supports nearly all devices
- Server backups
- Continuous/scheduled backups
- Compresses data for file-size and bandwidth
- Remote user management
- Legal compliances managed
- Unlimited users
- 30 versions
- Physically ships backups when needed
- Saves data forever (unless you delete manually)
I personally believe iDrive is one of the simpler and yet most effective backup solutions out there.
For starters, it’s compatible with everything. Computers, mobiles phones, Macs and even NAS (Synology/ QNAP/Netgear etc. supported).
Server backups (SQL, Hyper-V, Oracle, MS SharePoint etc.) are supported as well.
You can add external drives and USB sticks to your backup set and then these can be backed up as well.
Continuous data backup helps backup only the “new/changed” data in real-time (almost). You can obviously also schedule your backups. It also supports compression for bandwidth and space optimization.
It offers a control panel using which you can manage remote devices and backups as well. It also offers some of the best user-management options which you can use for your employees.
Even on the legal side, it takes care of compliances and requirements.
There’s this very unique feature where you can get your data shipped to you, physically! Sure, it takes time but it’s more secure, doesn’t require the internet and oh yes, it’s cool! (Obviously remote and instant backups are possible as well).
Unlike some other options on this list, it doesn’t have unlimited versioning. However, the 30 versions it does offer do seem enough, don’t they?
It does support disk cloning so you can back your entire hard disk up, either locally or on the cloud.
There’s this “True Achieving” feature. This basically means everything you ever backed up stays forever on your iDrive cloud unless you manually delete it!
There’s the AES-256 bit encryption which really is no big deal and more like the standard encryption we’ve come to expect by now.
Now, you do get a forever free plan with 10 GB storage. The first paid plan starts at $3.71/month.
5. Veeam
Website: https://www.veeam.com/
Notable features:
- Supports most devices
- E2E encryption
- Ransomware protection
- Disk imaging
- 30-day free trial
- DR Testing
- Starting price: Need to “request quote”.
Veeam is capable of backing up and restoring data from cloud servers, physical/virtual drives, and even NAS.
It uses image backups which speed up the process and offers better recovery. You can select to either recover specific items, or the entire backed up drive/file.
It encrypts the data End-to-End which makes it impervious to ransomware and other similar attacks. Even has in-built malware scanners which stop ransomwares even before they enter your backups.
Now, it has different modules which offer different features. The pricing varies accordingly. Unfortunately, the pricing isn’t very transparent and you need to “request” the pricing quotes from them.
On the brighter side, there’s a massive 30-day free trial. That gives you enough window to audit it for your small business, doesn’t it?
Its built in replication offers security and speed even for VMware and vSphere backups. There’s also an instant recovery engine which makes instant recovery to multiple VMs possible.
DR Testing is a feature that lets you “predict outcomes” although it’s only available on the more expensive plans.
My only complaint is that the interface is a bit complicated as compared to some other options listed here.
Which is the best cloud backup for small business in 2024?
Acronis Cyber Protect is my first recommendation. It certainly lacks a few features as compared to CrashPlan, which is my second recommendation to you.
Go with Acronis if you’re super tight on your budget but need the most features. Go with CrashPlan if you need the best features and budget isn’t a major issue.
With that, I’ll be signing off. I do hope this piece has been informative and helpful.
