NovaBACKUP review

NovaBACKUP is a serious bit of backup software for businesses of all sizes as well as home users, and its German coders specialize in enterprise-level data protection – so we’ve got high hopes for this particular bit of software.

Indeed, if you head to NovaBACKUP’s website you’ll see products for specific tasks, like disaster recovery or Microsoft 365 backups, and even areas where the company caters to particular industries, from dentistry to accountancy.

At first glance, then, there’s plenty to like – but should you deploy NovaBACKUP in your business?

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NovaBACKUP: Plans and pricing

It may be good news that NovaBACKUP is a high-end backup solution designed for enterprise, but brace yourself for the pricing – because this app is not cheap.

A one-PC licence for NovaBACKUP costs €100, which at the time of writing converts to $110, including an admittedly generous 1TB of cloud storage. A single-server licence costs €400 – or about $443 – and includes 250GB of cloud storage.

If you need a bespoke solution for your business, then you’ll need to talk to NovaBACKUP to work on a solution together – which makes sense, because then you should get a backup deployment that works for you and maximises value.

NovaBACKUP offers products for companies that need endpoint protection for remote workers, for businesses that need centrally-managed local and cloud backup for PCs, laptops and servers, and even packages for managed services providers who want to provide Backup-as-a-Service to other organisations.

Features

It’s expensive, yes, but NovaBACKUP is absolutely packed with features. You can preserve any files or folders, local or external drives, operating systems and send them to local drives, external drives, your 1TB of NovaBACKUP cloud storage space or any S3 compatible storage. Network-attached locations are also supported.

Additionally, NovaBACKUP now includes hybrid backup, which ensures more robust data protection by storing your data in three places, on two different types of media and with one copy stored offsite – what’s often referred to as a “3-2-1 backup strategy”. That’s important if you preserve mission-critical information in a commercial or healthcare environment.

It’s a comprehensive start, and NovaBACKUP also includes image backups for disaster recovery, VHD and VHDx backups, incremental backups, bare metal restoration and strong compression and encryption settings, including 256-bit AES and Blowfish encryption.

You can enjoy email notifications about your backup jobs – particularly helpful if you’re handling data in a business – and flexible file restoration means you can recover backups from any location.

NovaBACKUP offers extensive scheduling options, backup verification, custom commands to be performed around your backups, and there are extensive filtering options. In terms of core backup features, NovaBACKUP is excellent – there is nothing missing.

Opt for the Server product and you get support for Microsoft Hyper-V and VMWare backups and Microsoft SQL and Exchange support. Both apps include optional central management and monitoring features – ideal for businesses.

Upgrade to a Server Provider version – or another customised NovaBACKUP solution – and you can also add user account management, unlimited cloud storage, self-hosted cloud storage, and setup assistance.

Interface & Use

NovaBACKUP has every backup option that home and business users could possibly need, even if you wouldn’t know it from the aesthetic. The app looks decidedly old school, with old-fashioned fonts and graphics used throughout.

Still, if you get beyond the visuals then it’s pretty easy to use. Large icons on the home screen represent key backup options, and if you delve into the settings then it’s the usual list of backup sources on the left-hand side with more advanced options in a central window.

Backup logs and schedules are in their own tabs. And while there aren’t many easy wizard options for creating backup jobs, this enterprise-level app provides plenty of granularity that professionals will surely appreciate.

We tested our latest slate of backup apps with a 42GB document folder, a 2.5GB spreadsheet folder, a 162GB folder of media and an 82GB file that mixes all of those file types. We backed them up to three different SSDs to weed out any inconsistency.

And while NovaBACKUP was never slow, its results slipped consistently into the mid-table when stacked up with almost twenty other backup tools.

Its best results came when working with our Excel folder and our selection of mixed media files – it returned averages of four minutes and eighteen minutes respectively. Both of those numbers crept into the top half of our results tables.

Nova averaged sixteen minutes with our folder of documents, and seven minutes with our media files.

None of those results are slow, but lots of other apps are quicker – tools like Acronis Cyber Protect, EaseUS ToDo Backup and Macrium Reflect are notable options that easily outpace NovaBACKUP.

Support

Instead of taking the lead in the results tables, NovaBACKUP makes a big deal of its support offering – and rightly so.

You can submit support tickets, call a phone line that’s open between 9 am and 5 pm, and consult an extensive knowledge base. You can schedule appointments with the support team, dive into a forum, watch webinars, and get setup assistance depending on the product you’ve purchased.

Competition

NovaBACKUP jumps ahead of rivals like EaseUS Todo Backup and Macrium Reflect when it comes to support and sits alongside other enterprise-level offerings from products like Acronis Cyber Protect.

Verdict

Indeed, it’s probably the pricing that restricts NovaBACKUP’s appeal. While this is a fantastic tool for any business that wants to take backup seriously, especially if you want to build a bespoke package or protect servers, it’s probably overkill for home and small business users.

It’s got every feature you could possibly need, though, alongside excellent support options – there’s no doubt it earns its keep. And while it’s not the fastest, that is moot if you’re backing up to servers, network or cloud destinations.

NovaBACKUP is an excellent preservation option for businesses – expensive, sure, but you get what you pay for.