CloudBerry Lab Ltd., the backup and data management specialist, has just launched Desktop Backup Free with its new Backup 4.3 release.

CloudBerry Lab’s solution offers block level backup in addition to real-time and regular, scheduled backups for simple data, local disk image, or bare metal restore, together with an alert feature that tracks backups and restore plans by remote. The solution uses 256-bit AES encryption to protect data with user-controlled keys, while it offers a transparent exchange process that means only the end-user can access data residing in the cloud.

Alexander Negrash, marketing director at CloudBerry Lab, told eWeek the solution was designed for personal use after seeing how its business customers utilized public cloud storage services.

“The idea is to give individual users a chance to run CloudBerry Backup on their private computers at no charge, which enables users to back up their personal data directly to the cloud with no involvement by a third party, pay only for the storage being used, and not be locked-into one vendor.”

The service lets users switch between cloud providers at any time, so they can always choose the most cost-effective service that fits their needs. The company said it’s hoping that the free version will eventually entice business users to implement CloudBerry’s products for business purposes too.

CloudBerry Backup 4.3 comes with additional new features including VMware vCloud Air support, and file level recovery with image-based backups.

CloudBerry Backup 4.3 might appeal to businesses that are considering transitioning to the cloud from an on-premises environment, Negrash told eWeek. According to him, most businesses are concerned about possible cloud storage outages, in which their data might become inaccessible for a period of time – such incidents are fairly common, after all.

“With the growing popularity of cloud-hosted applications and more data stored in the cloud itself, we think we’ll start seeing a big demand for such solutions,” Negrash said.

Image credit: FutUndBeidl via flickr.com