IT Toolkit

If you picked up one of our USB drives, this is the page it points you to.

There is no software on those drives on purpose. We are a cyber security business, and the first thing we teach people is not to run programs from a USB drive somebody handed them at a meeting. So the drives carry documents only, and anything we recommend lives here — where you can download it from the people who actually make it, at the current version.

Everything below is our honest assessment. We are not paid by any of these companies.

First, a warning that catches a lot of businesses

Several of the best-known free backup tools are licensed for private use only. Using one in a business – including a one-person limited company — needs a paid licence, and a great many firms are technically in breach without ever having thought about it.

It is not a trap anyone sets deliberately. The download says “free”, the installer never mentions it, and the licence terms sit on a page nobody reads. We check, because sooner or later somebody else will.

So for each tool below, we have said plainly where it stands.

Our first choice: FreeFileSync

Best for: businesses that want their backup to be ordinary, readable files.

FreeFileSync compares two folders, shows you exactly what it is about to copy, change or delete before it does anything, and then copies only what has changed. Your first backup might take an hour; every one after that takes seconds.

What makes it our first choice:

  • The backup is just files. Plug the drive into any computer and open a document. No software needed to get your data back — which matters enormously on the day you actually need it.
  • Mirror with versioning. The drive matches your documents, but anything deleted or overwritten is kept in a dated folder first. This is what saves you when the problem is a mistake made last Tuesday rather than a dead hard disk.
  • It finds the drive by name. Windows hands external drives whatever letter is free, and a saved job pointed at the wrong one fails. FreeFileSync can refer to the drive by its name instead.
  • It shows you the plan before it runs it. Underrated: this is how you spot a ransomware attack before your backup tool faithfully overwrites your good copy with the encrypted one.

The licence position, plainly: FreeFileSync is free for private use. Business use requires a Business Edition licence — currently around €20 per device, paid once, including a year of updates. That applies to companies, charities and public bodies alike.

We think that is money well spent. It is a one-off cost of roughly a tenth of a decent external drive, for the tool that makes the drive worth having.

We can supply and set up the business licences for you if you would rather not deal with it – just ask.

If you would rather not pay anything: Kopia

Best for: businesses that want a genuinely free option and do not mind a different way of working.

Kopia is open source under the Apache 2.0 licence, which permits commercial use without restriction. It has a proper desktop application for both Windows and Mac, it handles scheduling and retention, and encryption is built in – so the backup is protected even if you never get round to encrypting the drive itself.

The trade-off, plainly: Kopia does not store your backup as ordinary files. It stores encrypted, deduplicated blocks, which means you need Kopia installed to get anything back out. That is fine when you are recovering a deleted folder on a working machine. It is less fine when the office server is dead, you are on a borrowed laptop, and you just want to open an invoice.

If that scenario worries you, pay the €20 for FreeFileSync. If it does not, Kopia is an excellent tool and costs nothing.

Duplicati is a reasonable third option, also free for commercial use, though its browser-based interface suits some people more than others: duplicati.com

Which should you choose?

  • You want to be able to open a backed-up document on any computer, with no software. → FreeFileSync, and buy the business licence.
  • You want zero software cost and you are comfortable that restoring means installing Kopia first. → Kopia.
  • You do not want to think about any of this. → That is what we do. Get in touch.

Whichever you pick, the setup steps are in our backup guide below. It covers what to back up and what to ignore, how to encrypt the drive before you copy anything onto it, and – the part almost everyone skips — how to prove the backup actually worked.

Download the guides

Free, no sign-up, same PDFs as the USB drives:

One last thing about downloading software

Always download from the vendor’s own site, and check the address bar before you click. Search results for popular free software are a well-known hunting ground – the paid result above the real one is not always the real one. The links on this page go directly to the projects themselves.

Need a hand with any of it?

We are Bitwise-IT, an IT support and cyber security company in Wickford, Essex, working with small businesses across Essex and beyond.

If you would like an honest opinion on where your business currently stands, we will review your setup and tell you straight. No pressure, no jargon, and no obligation.

01268 218301 · info@bitwise-it.co.uk

Last reviewed: 23rd July 2026. We check the recommendations and licence terms on this page periodically — if something here is out of date, please tell us.