• For small office/home office (SoHo) environments that require protection for workstations.
• For businesses that require centralized management for more advanced disaster recovery methods.
• For use in personal, home and non-commercial environments, to safeguard important data.

Data backup and synchronization

GFI BackUp’s innovative combination of company-wide data backup with synchronization via the user agent provides:
Traditional file backup and restore of data contained on servers and workstations
backup of files located on servers and workstations which meet a specific group set (e.g., financial files, productivity files, images and designs)
Synchronization of files or folders across several workstations, servers and laptops
Synchronization of files between backup servers, enabling the creation of redundant backups.

backup storage options

GFI BackUp enables you to perform backups to multiple devices, among others, internal/external hard disks, NAS devices, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray media, memory sticks and removable flash memory devices (USB drive, memory sticks, etc). GFI BackUp also supports backup tasks on LAN paths and FTP uploads with auto-resume.

Full or item-level restore options

GFI BackUp allows you to make a full restore of backup data or to select a set of individual folders and/or files. GFI BackUp allows you to perform a restore to a location of your choice, rather than forcing you to restore your data to its original location.

Disk image backup and restore (including to dissimilar hardware!)

GFI BackUp supports bare-metal/disk image backup and restore. Disk image backup allows you to create a snapshot of your entire system so you can recover your operating system, applications and data without having to go through the tedious re-installation process. By creating an image backup, you can protect yourself from disasters or business interruption like complete hardware failure, data corruption or theft. GFI BackUp can even restore an image backup to dissimilar hardware.

Microsoft SQL server backup and restore

GFI BackUp supports SQL Server backup and restore. By creating a point-in-time snapshot of your SQL Server database and settings, you will be able to recover your business database quickly and easily: You will be able to get your SQL Server database up and running in no time, avoiding expensive business downtime.

Include/exclude backup parameters

GFI BackUp provides a powerful mechanism that enables you to include or exclude specific files during a backup task. The mechanism can filter files according to their file type (for example, back up all .doc files but exclude all .tmp files). This will help reduce your backup storage requirements. GFI BackUp comes pre-configured with a number of group category sets such as ‘Productivity Files’ (grouping file types: .xls, .xlsx, .doc, .docx) making configuring backup tasks even easier. You can also create your own category groups.

Virtualized environments backup and restore – VMware

GFI BackUp supports backup and restore for your VMware Workstation and VMware Server environments. By automating the creation of a point-in-time snapshot of your VMware settings and core files, you will be able to recover your virtualized environment quickly and easily, avoiding expensive business downtime.

Virtualized environments backup and restore – Microsoft Hyper-V

GFI BackUp supports backup and restore for your Hyper-V environments. By automating the creation of a point-in-time snapshot of your Hyper-V settings and core files, you will be able to recover your virtualized environment quickly and easily.

Single backup task

Through GFI’s approach to network backup management, you can create a single backup task which backs up all required files and applies that task to all authorized GFI BackUp agents. GFI BackUp communicates with its agents and assigns them the single task you have configured. This differs from traditional backup software where you need to create a single backup task for each computer you want that task to run on, or even worse, where you must create multiple copies of that task and have to manage them in a distributed fashion.
Using GFI BackUp, you have only one place to go to (the web-based Administration Console) and from the comfort of your browser, you can create/select the task you want to manage, configure the changes and apply them. GFI BackUp handles the provisioning, scheduling and execution for you!

Features for the administrator

Web-based administration console

GFI BackUp has an easy-to-use web-based Administration Console to configure and manage all your backup tasks. The Administration Console can be accessed from anywhere in the network using your web browser. The administrator can also access the Administration Console from outside the local network (default on port http:5580 https:5543). Unlike most other backup products, it does not require a VPN connection. The Administration Console allows you to create, assign, manage, delete, analyze and run restore backup operations remotely.

Advanced task scheduler

GFI BackUp does not rely on the Windows Task Scheduler, but uses an advanced built-in and highly configurable scheduling mechanism. It supports scheduling tasks to run:

• Manually
• On Windows start-up/shutdown
• Hourly/daily
• Periodically

You can also configure a schedule to run every few days (e.g., every three days) and not run if, for instance, the day of the schedule happens to be a Wednesday.

Monitoring and reporting

GFI BackUp can easily be configured to email a custom list of recipients’ activity reports, such as task level summary reports containing activity log details of the task together with any task errors or warning results of that task. GFI BackUp can also send a daily email digest report on activities of the past 24 hours, keeping you up-to-date on what’s happening.
Even more sophisticated notification support is available via Windows Event Log reporting which can be used to integrate with your existing log monitoring infrastructure, such as GFI EventsManager or GFI MAX RemoteManagement, to monitor the success/failure of backup events as part of your integrated network health management solutions.
For debugging and deeper analysis needs, GFI BackUp records detailed information in log files about the operations it has performed, the files that were backed up and other important analytical data.

Technical features

Incremental, differential and other backup types

GFI BackUp can either be configured to back up only new and changed files (incremental), or to delete those files from the current backup that no longer exist in the source location (differential). GFI BackUp also provides a version control mechanism (Stack backup) that allows you to keep multiple versions of a file in the archives.

Data integrity

By default, GFI BackUp carries out cyclic redundancy checks (CRC) on each file to ensure data integrity and to protect against accidental changes due to communication errors.

Encryption

GFI BackUp uses military-strength 256-bit AES encryption to protect backed-up data privacy. AES encryption has been adopted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology as an FIPS-approved (Federal Information Processing Standard) symmetric encryption algorithm that should be used by US Government organizations (and others) to protect sensitive information.

backup of files that are open/in-Use

You can back up files even if they are still open, using the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (Microsoft VSS). Out-of-the-box, GFI BackUp is enabled to make use of Microsoft VSS to back up files that are in use by other applications such as Microsoft Outlook .pst files.

backup compression

Unlike traditional solutions, when performing data (file and folder based) backups, GFI BackUp does not lock you in by using a proprietary backup compression format; instead, GFI BackUp uses the standard Zip-64 file format when instructed to compress an archive. This means that data stored this way can be restored manually from the backup even if GFI BackUp is not installed. You can choose to create self-extracting archives as well as backups without compression for faster processing and redundancy. If using Zip compression, GFI BackUp can split and span the archive over multiple hard-drives.

Networked workstations

If networked workstations are switched off when a backup task is scheduled to start, these can be switched on automatically via the Wake-on-LAN (WOL) standard. When a backup task across the entire network is set to start at the same time, GFI BackUp balances the network backup workload to avoid overloading the network.

Unicode

GFI BackUp supports Unicode, the industry standard for universal character encoding, which means GFI BackUp supports all commonly used characters including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, and Russian.

Other features

Ability to restrict functionality available to non-administrative users through the web-based Administration Console
Ability to adapt to a number of network topologies and backup requirements
Equally powerful with the same ease of use in both workgroup and Active Directory domain environments
Ability to get a PC out of hibernation and run the assigned task if the PC is in power-saving mode
File deletion propagation in sync operations
Preservation of deleted files in sync operations
Delegation of the backup/restore/synchronization process to users
backup and synchronization of files located on different storage devices on different networks connected only through the Internet
Ability to configure a program/script to execute prior or on completion of task execution.