With progress, there appears to be a growing share of computer users who do not protect their system using backup software. By the same token, many home users are still unprotected from virus damage because they do not run an anti-virus program on their PC on their regular basis. The best protection against virus damage, however, is prevention: purchase good data backup software and run it often!

Simply by looking at the Internet, one may find various pc backup software providers with different strengths in each product. The typical PC user would want their system, application, and files backed up on a regular basis. Usually a simple disk image is enough but more advanced users with more files than the average user may want to invest in good file backup software.

Hard disk thievery affects computers but also media. Especially backup media is subject theft because its completeness of information-a company's backup tape in possession of a thief can be a real disaster because the entire company's intellectual property is within that one medium. The thieves can analyze the tape at their leisure, hidden from the public, and leak sensitive material to competitors. The industry's answer to this problem is naturally backup encryption and the recommendation to physically secure backup media, for example in safes.

IT gurus who wish to get their hands on a good server backup software package may want to focus on the file backup capabilities of their product. While a Windows backup may be necessary, it is usually more important to back up files quickly and reliably. The recent growth of Server Core and other installations of limited GUI operating systems may make data recovery plans more complicated since most backup tools do not support such environments. Managers would therefore want to check on their backup tool before planning a data center rollout.

In a manufacturing setting, network backup is a frequent practice. Backup targets of several computers are consolidated on a central machine, which is then backed up separately usually after business hours. IT administrators should consider using network backup software that allows bandwidth throttling to prevent the network from slowing down during work hours. Alternatively, backup should be scheduled to run at night.

Virtual machine and virtual host backup is a different method of backup, such as the backup of a virtual machine in Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. To back up a virtual machine while running, dedicated virtual backup software is needed that generates a VHD backup that is crash consistent. A simple VM backup script is usually not adequate.

For a successful backup of Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, the backup tool needs to aware and custom-made to fit into the limited operating system landscape created by Microsoft. Because Core Installations are very limited in their OS features, regular tools will not work and specialized Hyper-V backup software needs to be purchased.

Experts and fans of Microsoft Virtual PC, such as software testers and developers, also require a reliable method to backup Virtual PC machines. Similarly, those who fell in love with VirtualBox are also in need for automatic VirtualBox backup software. As with all virtual machine backups, the ideal solution should do the backup automatically and in the background.

In recent years, USB backup software has become very popular due to the proliferation of external hard disks. External hard drive backups are practical even to small and medium-sized companies because the cost per gigabyte is generally very low and the transfer speeds are phenomenal, especially with the recent innovation of USB 3.0.

To minimize the space required for backups, users often deploy a differential backup strategy, which compares the current state of a hard drive to that of the first backup run. A differential backup can also be restored relatively quickly because it is generally applied after the first backup has been restored.

The declining cost of Internet hosting and bandwidth has made FTP backup a feasible alternative to on-site backup. While FTP is supported by several backup programs, specialized FTP backup software may be necessary for power users who work with a variety of files, such as international file names and files larger than 4 GB. FTP backups are probably not suited as general backup strategies because the cost per terrabyte is still relatively high compared to that of USB and external hard drives.