NTI Backup Now Pro 7 review: Very capable, but annoyingly glitchy

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

What are NTI Backup Pro 7’s features?

As I mentioned, NTI Backup Now Pro 7 offers file and folder backup, drive and partition image backup, continuous backup, and cloud backup. Continuous backup is file and folder backup where changes are backed up as they occur. Cloud backup is also file and folder backup, but to NTI’s own, extremely pricey online storage.

The plain file/folder, image, and online backups are stored in proprietary container files (single large files with all the data contained inside), while the continuous backup is a browsable plain file backup — i.e., files are copied as you would using Windows Explorer. Older revisions of files are kept in a separate folder.

The Backup Now Pro 7 interface is very straightforward, though unlike the EZ version, there’s no hand-holding when it comes to selecting data to back up. No biggie, but it could be just a tad friendlier.

The just-mentioned NTI EZ Backup Now 7.5 (which is $10 less per license) has a slightly more intuitive workflow, though the interface is not one of the prettiest. It lacks the Pro version’s continuous backup, but is otherwise roughly feature equivalent.

Back to Pro…. There’s granular scheduling (in addition to the continuous, of course) available, as well incremental backups to save space, and automatic maintenance of destination storage by purging older files when necessary. Encryption and password protection are also provided.

An NTI Backup Now Pro 7 feature that I absolutely love is the ability to choose multiple local destinations (a secondary internal drive plus external drive, etc.) for a backup job. It would be nice if you could combine local with network locations and the NTI Cloud, but hey, it’s a start