Iperius Backup Basic review: Versatile, extremely powerful — and best for IT types

Best Prices Today: Iperius Backup Basic

Iperius Backup Basic is an extremely powerful backup program with a boatload of features and options, as well as broad online storage and network support. There are also sure signs of an enterprise-grade focus — support for Hyper-V, ESXi, and tape.  

For the average user, the main issues with Iperius Backup will be both its daunting scope and its not-always-obvious game plan. It all makes sense after some tire-kicking, but operations such as adding consumer-grade online storage accounts could certainly be a lot friendlier.

A limited, but still useful free version is available if all you need is the plain file backup.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best Windows backup software for comparison.

What are Iperius Backup’s features?

Iperius Backup Basic supports file backup (plain and zip-compressed/encrypted) as well as imaging to both its own proprietary format and a Windows recovery-compatible format that automatically includes the OS drive.

Note that you must download and install the CBT (Changed Block Tracking) service from the image-backup dialog before you can perform incremental or differential backups in the proprietary format. Full and Windows-compatible backups don’t require it.

By far my favorite feature of Iperius Backup is that it allows multiple destinations per job. Most users have a single set of data they want saved to multiple locations, but the majority of backup programs require that you create/recreate a separate job for every destination. This does mean that some Iperius options, such as compression, must be defined with each destination.

Iperius Backup images to friendly VHDX containers with both jobs. The VHDX files are mountable by Windows and various virtual machines (VirtualBox, VMware, etc.) programs, so you’re not reliant upon Iperius to browse them. In other words, they’re application independent.

I’d be here all day if I listed the plethora of options in Iperius Backup. But a sampling includes: extremely granular scheduling down to the minute (effectively real time), email upon error or completion, network user profiles (user name/password so you don’t have to re-enter them for every job), compression levels, post- and pre-backup run of other applications, job export and import, extensive log files, and a host of criteria about what and how to copy, etc. 

Iperius backs up to cloud services such as Dropbox and Google Drive. However unlike other programs that provide wizards to connect with consumer-oriented online storage repositories, Iperius treats them all as if they were Amazon S3 and S3-compatible services. I.e. you must log on independently to the service’s website to generate and copy access tokens and IDs. Not the worst thing in the world, but not consumer friendly.

Iperius also offers an online console management service for IT types that will track what’s been going on with your backups and let you control them remotely. Assuming, of course, that you’ve downloaded the local client service.

Iperius Backup will also create recovery media in several Windows PE versions (with bare-metal restore) directly to an external drive, or to an ISO file for use later. Nicely, it includes a disk clone utility that’s not in the Windows application.

That’s an especially nice feature as it allows you to make an exact backup of a disk before overwriting it — in my experience, always a good failsafe measure. The program connects to the Iperius website to download the source file during the creation routine.

The free version of Iperius is great for backing up files to local and local network destinations, but it won’t run as a service, perform multiple simultaneous backups, or create recovery boot media as the pay versions will. To be honest, you might as well stick with Windows File History if the pro features are absent.

I do have one feature request for Iperius Backup — allow online storage services as sources as well as destinations. I like to back up from one to the other. A dedicated two-way sync function might be handy also. The file copy does have some options that render it one-way sync.

How easy is Iperius Backup to use?

Because of the clean design and attractive interface, Iperius definitely gives you the initial impression that you’re dealing with a pro-level application. Not that there aren’t some ugly ducklings that will haul the freight, but inspiring confidence is a good thing — if it’s backed up by performance, of course, as Iperius is.

However, as of this latest version (8.5), the size and spacing of some screen elements was a bit off as you can see in the screen caps. Some buttons are very tiny — including the non-standard windows minimize/maximize/close controls — and text is scrunched together in menus. Dialog titles are overwritten by the custom icon. Hardly insurmountable issues, but a ding to that confidence I just rattled on about.

Also, the backup progress dialog isn’t modal and disappears behind the main window if you access the latter. This was an issue I mentioned five years ago, and I’m slightly peeved that such a simple thing still hasn’t been fixed. Additionally, the job creation dialog completely eclipses the main Window and looks nearly identical, which can create some initial confusion.

I’d also like to be able to define the additional destinations in the wizards, not add them later in the destinations tab. And for some reason, if you want to give the job a name of your choosing, you must do so post-wizard in the summary pane.

Obviously you can easily work around all these relatively minor foibles, but I do wish Iperius would put some more work into the interface and workflow.

How much does Iperius Backup cost?

A single PC license is 69 euros ($71.58 at the time of this writing) — more than double what the program cost five years ago. That puts it up against some rather heady competition in Acronis True Image, R-Drive Image, Easeus ToDo Backup, and others. Still, I recommend that you give the 21-day trial a shot. The advanced features are useful, and if you don’t need them, you can continue to use the limited version for free. You can compare all Iperius Backup versions on the company’s website.

How fast is Iperius Backup?

I did a number of tests with Iperius Backup, including multiple-action file/image jobs with multiple destinations. For all file-related tasks, including downloading files from FTP and network locations, it performed quickly without slowing down my system in the least. The integrity of the backups was perfect and there was only one glitch operationally, described below.

At first, after a successful small imaging job, I thought the company had fixed another issue I noted five years ago, where the program wouldn’t write to exFAT external SSDs. Alas, while trying to write a 750GB Windows recovery image, the program tanked after around 50GB.

Reformatting the external drive to NTFS solved the issue, but exFAT can handle a file that large, and exFAT is very common on drives being used across multiple operating systems. On the up side, the job took ony 20 minutes. Sweet.

Should you buy Iperius backup?

Other than the exFAT deal, I’m smitten with Iperius Backup’s versatility and performance. That said, it needs to be a tad easier to use to capture a larger portion of the consumer audience. And for goodness sake, fix some of the bugs that I pointed out five years ago.

Negativity aside, for power users and IT types, Iperius Backup is a fantastically powerful program that should definitely be given a look-see — especially in light of the online management console.