Best Free & Open Source Alternatives to Acronis

Duplicati is a free, open-source backup client that securely stores encrypted, compressed, and incremental backups to a wide range of cloud storage providers and remote servers — including Amazon S3, Google Drive, OneDrive, Backblaze B2, SFTP, WebDAV, and many more.

It runs as a background service with a web-based interface, allowing you to configure schedules, retention policies, and encryption without leaving your browser. All data is encrypted client-side before leaving your machine, following a true zero-knowledge (trust-no-one) model — meaning even the storage provider cannot read your files.

Compared to services like Backblaze Personal Backup or Acronis Cyber Protect, Duplicati gives you full control over where your data is stored and eliminates recurring subscription fees for backup software. It is ideal for self-hosters and privacy-conscious users who want automated, encrypted offsite backups without vendor lock-in.

Portabase is an open-source, self-hosted database backup and restore platform designed for DevOps teams and database administrators. It supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, SQLite, Redis, Valkey, Firebird SQL, and Microsoft SQL Server — all managed from a single web-based dashboard.

The platform uses a secure agent-based architecture where lightweight agents deployed on database hosts handle backup operations without requiring inbound ports to be opened. Backups can be stored on multiple backends simultaneously, including local filesystems, S3-compatible storage (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO), and Google Drive. Portabase features built-in scheduling with cron syntax, retention policies, organization-based access control (RBAC), and notifications via Slack, Discord, and Telegram.

Portabase is built with TypeScript and offers both a web UI and a CLI for managing agents, configurations, and databases. It provides OIDC and OAuth2 authentication support, making it easy to integrate with existing identity providers. Unlike proprietary enterprise backup solutions, Portabase gives you full control over your data infrastructure with no vendor lock-in or subscription fees.

BackupPC is a high-performance, enterprise-grade system for backing up Windows, Linux and macOS machines to a server's disk pool. It runs entirely from the server: Windows clients are pulled over SMB, Unix clients over rsync or tar over SSH/NFS, so there is no agent to install or maintain on the machines it protects.

The defining feature is its pooling scheme: identical files across every machine and every backup generation are stored only once, combined with compression. The project's documented example fits roughly 1200 GB of raw data from 95 laptops into 150 GB on the server, which is what makes disk-only retention affordable for fleets.

A CGI web interface covers administration (logs, status, configuration) and lets users initiate and cancel backups, browse past backups, download single files or zip/tar archives, and push restores back to the client machine over SMB, rsync or tar. Scheduling is configurable system-wide or per PC, with parallel jobs and email reminders for machines that have not been backed up recently. Written in Perl with a development history going back to the early 2000s, it suits sites that want a set-and-forget, disk-based network backup server rather than a full data-protection suite.

Bareos (Backup Archiving Recovery Open Sourced) is a network backup and recovery suite for mixed IT environments, forked from Bacula and maintained by Bareos GmbH & Co. KG. It protects data across Linux, Windows, FreeBSD and macOS clients with a catalog-driven design that tracks every job, file version and storage volume, and it ships a web UI (Bareos WebUI) for administration, browsing and restores.

Where Commvault bundles proprietary agents and subscription licensing, Bareos is AGPLv3 with no open-core restrictions, publishing community packages alongside optional commercial subscriptions. The architecture separates the director, storage daemon and client daemons, so deployments scale from a handful of machines to large estates with backups on disk, tape libraries (including WORM media) or S3-compatible object storage.

Enterprise workflows covered include Always Incremental backup schemes, dedup-friendly storage formats for ZFS/VDO/btrfs, encrypted communication, role-based ACLs and bare-metal recovery with Relax-and-Recover on Linux and Barri disaster recovery on Windows. The same engine extends to VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, Proxmox and databases through plugins, and NDMP support covers SAN backups.

UrBackup is an open source client/server backup system that pairs image backups with file backups, so you get both full-machine recovery and fast per-file restores. The client continuously watches file changes, which makes incremental file backups very fast, and both file and image backups run while systems are in use, including open files like Outlook .pst databases.

The backup server ships an integrated web interface for configuring storage, monitoring client status, and browsing and restoring previous backups. Compared with Commvault, setup is dramatically lighter: install the server, set the storage path in the web UI, install clients, and the server auto-discovers them on the LAN and starts backing up.

Servers run on Windows, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and several Linux-based NAS systems, while clients exist for Windows, macOS and Linux. Clients can back up over the internet, so laptops and remote workers phone home without a VPN. Identical files across clients are stored only once, and drive-volume backups are restored bare-metal from a bootable USB restore stick.

burp is a client/server network backup and restore program for Unix-like servers, with clients for Linux, BSD and Windows. Backups travel over TLS with per-client SSL certificates and built-in CA tooling (burp_ca), and scheduled runs are driven by server-side timers: clients periodically poll the server, which decides when each one actually backs up.

Storage on the burp server is deduplicated with librsync deltas, and the storage layout mirrors the client's file tree using hard links for unchanged data, keeping repeated backups compact without a separate dedup layer. Client-side encryption can be enabled in the configuration for sensitive environments.

Compared with Commvault, burp is deliberately minimal: no web console and no agent management suite, just text-file configuration, a CLI, and cron-style scheduling, with a Windows installer and scheduler task for Windows clients. The documentation covers automatic client upgrades and bare-metal restore procedures for Windows and Ubuntu, and the codebase has been actively developed since 2011 as a compact, scriptable alternative to heavier network backup systems.