It's been quiet on this blog since the July comparison of Windows backup tools. The app has been busier. BackupKit's first public release, 2026.8.1, went out on 6 August, 2026.8.2 followed three days later, and 2026.9.1 landed in September. Rather than three separate announcements, here is all of it in one place, in plain words.
Object storage made it into the first release
When I introduced BackupKit, Amazon S3, Azure Blob and Google Cloud Storage were “coming shortly after launch.” They didn't wait. All three are in 2026.8.1, together with the S3-compatible providers: Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Wasabi, DigitalOcean Spaces, and a generic S3-compatible option for anything else.
Before shipping, each connector ran the full storage test suite against the real service — real AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, R2, B2 and Wasabi accounts, not just an emulator. You bring the bucket and the keys, and nothing of mine sits in between. Keys limited to a single bucket work too, which is how most people should set them up anyway. That brings BackupKit to 24 destinations.
The installer is small, too: about 34 MB. BackupKit doesn't carry the embedded browser and file-manager parts of FTPie, the app it grew out of. Every file inside it is digitally signed, not just the main program, which cuts down on the antivirus and SmartScreen false alarms that unsigned files tend to trigger.
Encryption: one checkbox, always AES-256
In the first release, encryption was an option buried inside the compression settings, with a dropdown for the method. That dropdown defaulted to legacy ZIP encryption, which is weak. So if you ticked the password box and left everything else alone, you got less protection than you thought. That was my mistake, and 2026.8.2 removed it.
Encryption is now its own step in the backup wizard: one checkbox, one password, always AES-256. It no longer needs compression either, so you can encrypt without compressing, compress without encrypting, or both.
Two more changes around the password:
- It is stored with Windows' own protection (DPAPI), tied to your Windows account. Before, it sat unencrypted in a local database, so a copy of that file was a copy of your password.
- Restoring an encrypted backup asks for it. And if a scheduled run can't unlock its password, it now stops before uploading anything, instead of quietly writing an unencrypted archive.
The old settings were not carried over, so a job created in 2026.8.1 came back with encryption off — and because it still ran successfully, nothing warned you. Open each job that should be encrypted, tick Encrypt this backup with AES-256 and enter the password again. Snapshots you already have are untouched and restore normally. The 2026.8.2 release notes have the details.
Knowing what your backups actually did
A backup app earns trust by telling you what happened while you weren't looking. Three things got better here:
- A health dot on every job. Green when the last run worked, amber when something went wrong recently, red when the last run failed, grey when the job is paused. Hover it to see how the last several runs went, so “solid all week” and “fails every other night” stop looking the same.
- One Activity page. Every run of every job, newest first, filterable by job, severity and time. It is saved to disk, so it survives a restart. When a run fails, one click opens the log for exactly that run.
- A Stop button. While a job runs, its Run now button turns into Stop. Before, the only way out of a long backup was to wait or close the app. A stopped run is recorded as interrupted, not as a success.
Ten themes
BackupKit had Dark and Light. It now has ten: five dark (Dark, Nocturne, Ember, Obsidian, Pine) and five light (Light, Mist, Parchment, Daylight, Sage). The original two were rebuilt along the way. Surfaces that were meant to be distinct had drifted to almost the same colour, so even if you never open the picker, the app is easier to read than it was in August.
There is one theme picker, in Settings, and themes can switch on their own: pick one for the day and one for the evening, set the hours, and BackupKit follows the clock. Every theme is included in every plan.
Ask your AI assistant whether the backups ran
This is the newest piece, in 2026.9.1. BackupKit now includes an MCP server. MCP is the open standard that lets AI assistants such as Claude, Cursor or VS Code use outside tools. Connect one, and you can ask “did last night's backups all run?” or “what's in the latest Photos backup?” and get the answer from BackupKit itself — the same green, amber and red the app shows.
I was careful about what it is allowed to do:
- It is off until you turn it on, in Settings > MCP. Even then it can only look. Running, stopping or pausing jobs is a second switch.
- Restores and new backups always ask you. The assistant can open the Restore dialog or the new-backup wizard with everything filled in, but you press the button.
- Your passwords never reach it. Storage credentials, sign-in tokens and encryption passwords stay inside BackupKit, and it cannot edit or delete a job.
Connect an assistant sets up Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf and Gemini CLI for you, and shows the exact steps for everything else. The MCP page has the whole story.
A friendlier trial
The 30-day trial now starts the first time you open BackupKit, with no form in the way. A small countdown in the window shows how long is left — quiet at first, more visible near the end. If 30 days wasn't enough to decide, you can request a 14-day extension from the licence screen, once per installation.
Fixes worth knowing about
- Successful runs could vanish from the history. On a job with more than 50 runs, the history clean-up could delete the run that had just started. The backup itself was fine; only its record was lost. Fixed in 2026.8.2.
- A folder at the root of a drive lost the first letter of its name inside the archive, and restoring it brought back the wrong name. New archives are correct — run the backup once to get a clean copy.
- Far fewer untranslated words. The app speaks 20 languages, and about 1,900 translations were added or corrected in September, so much less English survives a language switch.
The website speaks six more languages
backupkit.io is now available in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese, alongside English. Pick yours from the language menu.
Coming soon: winget, Chocolatey and the Microsoft Store
Most people will keep downloading BackupKit from this site, and that is fine. But if you prefer to install software with a package manager, BackupKit is on its way to winget, Chocolatey and the Microsoft Store.
The groundwork is done. Every release now gets its own permanent, versioned installer, which all three require, and the installer can run fully silently. UpWatchr, the smallest of my apps, went through the whole process first as a test run. BackupKit follows with an upcoming release, and I will post here when the listings are live.
More to read in Q4
The blog was quiet because the time went into the app. That changes in Q4: more guides, and more honest comparisons. Until then, there are already side-by-side comparisons with 16 other backup tools — Duplicati, Backblaze, Arq, Acronis, Macrium Reflect, Veeam and more — and three free planning tools, including a cloud backup cost calculator and a 3-2-1 backup planner.
Still on the roadmap, and not shipped yet: incremental backups, a Windows shell extension, a tray status icon and bandwidth throttling.
Get it
BackupKit updates itself, so if you already have it, you probably have all of this. If you're new, download the free trial — 30 days, every feature, no card required. The full lists are in the release notes for 2026.8.1 and 2026.8.2.
Thanks for reading. If there's something you want BackupKit to do next, tell me — it genuinely shapes what gets built.
