Hands-on restore tests, transparent pricing calculators, and industry-specific guides for Microsoft 365/Google Workspace, endpoints, servers, and ransomware recovery—so you can choose confidently and protect your business without wasting days comparing tabs.
FocusBackup turns backup confusion into a clear decision in minutes. We run real restore drills, tear down pricing, and map compliance for verticals like legal, dental, and creative studios. Our comparison tools and decision trees point you to the right fit for your size, stack, and risk tolerance. Read, compare, and click straight to the vendor with confidence—no sales calls required.
If you’re a small business owner or the accidental IT person, picking a backup tool feels like guessing. Everyone claims “simple” and “secure,” yet restore times, hidden fees, and compliance gaps only show up when it’s too late. You don’t have days to test every option or decipher per-device vs. per-GB pricing.
What you need is a plain‑English recommendation based on real restores and total cost—for your stack, your industry, and your tolerance for downtime. Not vendor fluff. Not endless spreadsheets. Just a confident choice you can make today.
FocusBackup does the unglamorous work for you: we run restore drills, verify what’s actually backed up, and tally true monthly costs including storage and overages. Then we translate it into a clear pick for your use case, with a couple of solid alternatives if your needs are special.
Our decision trees and coverage matrices make the invisible visible—what a tool captures in Microsoft 365, how long typical restores take, and how ransomware recovery plays out. Vertical guides address compliance and workflow realities for legal, dental, and creative teams.
You’ll get the confidence of independent testing plus the speed of a guided choice. Click through to the vendor from our review and start your free trial or purchase, knowing what you’re getting and what you’ll pay.
FocusBackup was founded by an ex‑MSP engineer and an office‑manager‑turned‑IT‑wrangler who both lived the pain of “we thought we were backed up.” We’ve seen half‑configured cloud syncs, restore scripts that look great until a real outage, and budgets wrecked by hidden storage fees. That’s why we test restores first and read the marketing second. We break things, time results, and document what matters for small businesses, not data centers. Our reviews are independent and supported by clearly disclosed affiliate links when you choose a vendor through us. When a tool fails our tests, it doesn’t make the shortlist—period.
Share your basics—endpoints, servers, Microsoft 365/Google Workspace, storage size, and compliance needs. It takes under two minutes.
We match you to 2–3 best‑fit solutions with restore notes, pros/cons, and true estimated costs for your scenario.
Dive into our tests, coverage matrices, and pricing calculator. Adjust retention or devices and watch costs update instantly.
Click through to your chosen vendor for a free trial or purchase. Keep our checklist handy for a clean, compliant rollout.
Real experiences from people who trust us
“I manage a 12‑person dental practice and dreaded backups. FocusBackup’s dental guide spelled out image retention and HIPAA items I didn’t know to ask. We chose iDrive for Business, tested restores the same day, and our monthly spend is exactly what the calculator projected.”
“We’re a small architecture studio with big files. FocusBackup’s coverage matrix showed which tools handled NAS plus 365. We went with MSP360 and cut our restore time from over an hour to about 20 minutes in testing.”
“As a legal boutique, compliance makes me nervous. The legal checklist and vendor notes made it clear what was BA‑A‑friendly and how to configure retention. We selected Dropsuite for M365 and sleep better now.”
“I was MSP‑curious but not ready to resell. Their decision tree gave me a Backblaze Business pick for our endpoints and a Rewind add‑on for Shopify. Took 30 minutes to commit instead of my usual weekend rabbit hole.”
Most readers choose a solution on the Free plan. Pro and Team add calculators, templates, and hands‑on help to move faster with less risk.
A guided flow that narrows your choices to a top pick and two alternates based on stack, data size, and downtime tolerance.
A grid mapping what each tool actually protects—mail, Teams, SharePoint, Drive, permissions, versions, archives.
Enter devices, storage, and retention to see live monthly/annual cost estimates across your shortlisted vendors.
Step‑by‑step playbook with isolation tasks, clean restore steps, and verification checklist you can run quarterly.
HIPAA/GLBA mappings with vendor BAAs, encryption notes, and retention recommendations tuned for small firms.
A hybrid approach for big assets—local NAS snapshots plus cloud backup—with restore time expectations.
Understand when file‑level backups are enough and when you need bare‑metal imaging—plus the impact on restore time and budget.
A plain‑English breakdown of native retention vs. true backup, and how leading tools cover mail, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive.
Plug in your numbers to set realistic recovery objectives and pick a solution that meets them without overspending.
A practical look at imaging sizes, retention, HIPAA concerns, and vendor picks that fit a dental workflow.
A step‑by‑step exercise you can run quarterly to validate backups before you need them.
Everything you need to know
We perform restore‑focused drills: file/folder undeletes, endpoint bare‑metal or image‑based restores (when supported), and Microsoft 365/Workspace item restores. We time steps, verify integrity, and document failure points. Tests are repeated on updated versions and major releases.
No. Our rankings are editorial and based on testing. We use clearly disclosed affiliate links; if you buy through them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Vendors cannot buy placement, and tools that fail key tests do not make our shortlist.
We model public pricing and common usage patterns as closely as possible, including storage tiers and retention. Actual bills can vary with data growth and promotions. Treat our numbers as a realistic estimate and confirm final pricing on the vendor’s checkout.
Both. We review endpoint backups, image‑based server backups, NAS workflows, and SaaS backups for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Each review clearly states what environments a tool supports and where it shines.
We provide checklists and vendor notes to help you assess compliance fit, including BAAs and encryption details. Final compliance responsibility rests with your organization. Use our guidance to structure questions and verify requirements with your counsel or compliance lead.
Restore performance can vary by hardware, bandwidth, and dataset. We publish our test conditions for context and focus on medians across repeated runs. Use our numbers as a baseline and run your own drills after deployment.
Yes. Pro subscribers can email us specifics for tailored guidance, and Team plans include a quarterly 1:1 review. We’ll point out trade‑offs and edge cases so you don’t get surprised later.
Demos show best‑case scenarios. We simulate mistakes and failures—because that’s real life. Our incentives are aligned with your outcomes, not a quota. If a tool is great, we’ll say why; if it isn’t, we’ll show you where it breaks.
Interactive tools to help you get the most out of your business.
Run through our decision tree and see your shortlist with real restore data and total cost in minutes. Don’t wait for a crisis to find the gaps.
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