To assist home PC users during these troubled economic times and to help them understand the importance of data backups, GFI Software today announced the release of a free version of its newly-developed backup and recovery software called GFI Backup 2009 - Home Edition. Perfect for home users, GFI Backup 2009 allows PC users to safeguard precious memories - pictures, video, Office documents - and any files stored on their computer.

The FREE software can be downloaded from https://www.gfi.com/backup-hm/free-backup-software/ and allows home users to keep regular and updated copies of all important files and safeguard data in case something goes wrong. This is GFI’s first release of a recovery product designed specifically for home users.

“Security threats do not only affect businesses but home users as well. In many cases, loss of data for individuals is heartbreaking because memories, personal documents and important files are lost due to hard disk failure or virus attacks,” said Walter Scott, CEO, GFI Software. “We firmly believe in helping people be better prepared and we are doing this by giving home users a full-featured backup software product for free.”

GFI Backup 2009 is an easy-to-use backup and recovery software solution that allows users to backup all their important files and, when needed, recover data within minutes using the product’s wizard-driven interface. GFI Backup 2009 does not use a proprietary format - all data is saved to common ZIP files making it easy to restore data to a computer that may not have GFI Backup installed on it.

Data can be stored on nearly every storage device available such as internal or external hard disks, local area network (LAN) locations, CD/DVD media, removable media devices (USB sticks, memory sticks, flash memory, floppy disks, etc.) and remote locations using FTP with upload auto-resume. Data can also be protected with military-strength 256-bit AES strong encryption.

GFI Backup 2009 is currently available for home users. The company will release a small business/corporate version later this year.