MSP360 Backup Review: A powerful Time Machine alternative for advanced Mac users

Best Prices Today: MSP360 Backup

• Best for: Technically confident Mac users, IT admins, power users managing multiple backup targets
• Not for: Beginners, users who just want Time Machine-style simplicity

There are times when your backup methodology needs to move beyond the easy convenience of Apple’s free Time Machine backup, wherein the software will shoot everything over to a copy of everything in incremental backups to an external hard drive, iCloud, or NAS drive. In these cases, you’re going to start looking into a wider array of cloud services to back up to, complete with more customization to begin to handle things at a near-system administrator level.

This is where MSP360 Backup (formerly Cloudberry) comes in, taking the next step beyond Time Machine and more consumer-level backup software, but bringing some of its Windows port kludge with it.

MSP360 Backup enables secure backup and recovery of files, servers, and applications, supporting local and cloud storage (like AWS and Azure) with encryption, automation, and centralized management.

To its credit, there isn’t a lot of overhead involved with MSP360 Backup, which requires only macOS 10.12 (Sierra) or later to install and run, is available as a 15-day free trial with no credit or debit card needing to be sent along to create a trial account. The software, which is available in both free and subscription tiers, offers an impressive layer of features, including backup support to assorted cloud storage platforms such as AWS S3, Wasabi, or Backblaze B2. And while the free version offers limited total capacity cap of 5TB across both local and cloud storage as well as limited support and single machine management only, you don’t feel as if you’re being entirely shorted by not signing up for a paid account off the bat.

What MSP360 does well

As expected, MSP360 Backup installs easily, prompting you to allow it full access to all the files on your hard drive. From there, it begins to offer a fairly massive range of customization and options, including AES 128, AES 192, and AES 256-bit encryption, password protection and compression, customizable scheduling, support for pre-backup and post-backup scripts to be run, as well as restoration options.

MSP360 Backup drops you into a more technical world of backup and restoration and it works well. The scheduling feature worked like a charm, and quick tests to gauge local and online backup went well, the copies moving briskly between both rotational drives as well as solid-state media.

Pushing up to online/cloud-based media went quickly, the software handling a 70+ GB test archive well, even as it created both its own backup image format yet kept the archive accessible so files could be entered via the Finder and retrieved as needed. The functionality is there, and once you enter the container login and password for your cloud service of choice, you’re up and running with a powerful tool that can be readily configured to handle scheduling, security, and network protocols as needed.

The local and cloud-based storage account formats it handles, such as AWS, Wasabi, and Backblaze B2, are genuinely impressive.

Add copious log files and task history descriptions, and you have a backup utility that puts aspiring high-end consumer users and aspiring system administrators in hog heaven.

What MSP360 could improve on

Still, there are some caveats to sort out. For all its capabilities, MSP360 Backup looks and feels like a Windows utility that’s undergone only the most marginal effort to be ported over to macOS. Yes, the customization and tools are there, but UI elements such as an estimated time remaining counter for tasks are missing that could readily accompany the existing elapsed time counter. The interface feels vague, and placing the mouse over an icon fails to explain what that function does.

A help guide is available online (Read Guide), but the MSP360 Backup YouTube channel feels more geared towards marketing than offering a meaningful help or tutorial guide. What’s present takes some learning, and improved tutorials as well as quick links to better tutorials and guides could only help.

Finally, MSP360 Backup’s error messages feel vague when things do go wrong, and instead of being something that can be quickly looked up and noodled out, they leave you feeling as if you’re going through more trial and error than should be necessary.

The tools are there, but the user interface and help system could use some thought and some updates, especially for new users and users who are moving beyond the consumer realm and into something more technical and more customization and configuration-heavy, which MSP360 Backup is.

Should you buy MSP360

MSP360 might suit power users who are looking to move beyond Apple’s Time Machine and other consumer-focused backup and recovery utilities. MSP360 dives into local, script-based, and cloud-based backups and restorations and does it well. It also benefits from strong encryption, scripting support, and good performance.

The price point is right, even the free version is admirably powerful, and the 15-day free trial offers an impressive feature set that’s worth exploring.

However, it isn’t for the faint of heart. MSP360 Backup would benefit from a Mac-like UI, clearer error messaging, beginner-friendly documentation and/or YouTube tutorial videos.

For more backup options see our round up of the Best Mac backup software and cloud backup for Macs.