Best And Fairest Software Programs
There are a bunch of things that you can expect any genealogical software to do: Build a family tree. Record information on your ancestors: dates, locations, relationships, etc. Document research sources and link them to your family tree. Maintain more than one database for multiple family trees.
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The Rundown
- Best Overall:SketchUp Pro at Sketchup.com, “Unquestionably the best home design software out there.”
- Best Budget: Total 3D Home, Landscape & Deck Premium Suite at Amazon, 'Upload your own sketches or choose from 14,000 samples to get your planning started.'
- Best for DIY Home Enthusiasts:Home Designer Professional at Amazon, “The best thing for DIY home enthusiasts.”
- Best for Ease of Use:Sweet Home 3D at Amazon, “You can create straight, round or sloping walls with precise dimensions, with just your mouse and keyboard.”
- Best for Landscaping:HGTV Home and Landscape Platinum at Amazon, “Provides an easy way to plan your home's outdoor surroundings, exactly how you want them.”
- Best Online:Space Designer 3D at Spacedesigner3d.com, “A web-based app that lets you plan and visualize your ideal home, using just your Web browser.”
- Best for Mobile:Homestyler at Homestyler.com, “Homestyler is a free app, and available on both iOS and Android mobile platforms.”
- Best Splurge:Chief Architect Premium at Chiefarchitect.com, “If budget isn't a concern, it's the best that there is, period.”
Our Top Picks
Best Overall: SketchUp Pro
With its expansive feature set, advanced 3D modeling tools and online forums having everything from tutorials to discussions, SketchUp Pro is unquestionably the best home design software out there.
SketchUp Pro lets you effortlessly design highly accurate (to a thousandth of an inch) 3D models of homes (and other similar structures), all using simple click-and-release mouse actions. Just choose from one of the many preloaded templates, select a view and you're ready to go. In addition to 3D models, you can also create plans, elevations, details, title blocks and a lot more, using the 'LayOut' tool. It's also great for making presentation documents, supporting everything from drafting to vector illustrations. The program makes it easy to turn models into animated walkthroughs and flyovers that explain every detail. You can also add elements such as line work, textures and shadows to 2D documents. Then there are the dimensioning tools, which snap to the edges of models and allow you to quickly set format, scale and precision level of displayed measurements. From architects and builders to engineers and urban planners, SketchUp can be used by everyone. The created design documents can be exported as PDFs, images and CAD files.
One of the most impressive features of SketchUp Pro is 3D Warehouse, a huge library of free 3D models. You can choose from a vast array of 3D objects, and use them in your home's design.
Best Budget: Total 3D Home, Landscape & Deck Premium Suite
Teeming with options, the Home, Landscape & Deck Premium Suite software from Total 3D offers nearly boundless room for creativity while designing rooms and gardens. You can upload your own sketches of your dream home or choose from 14,000 samples to get your planning started. To see how your own furniture would look in different designs, you can import digital images of your current pieces and textiles or utilize a catalog of 20,000 brand-name products. Visualize nearly any possibility with custom windows, doors, floors, carpets, roofs, appliances, paint colors, and wallpaper. A how-to video library offers step-by-step instructions for navigating the software, and over 2,500 photos of homes and landscapes can provide inspiration or guidance.
Best for DIY Home Enthusiasts: Home Designer Professional
Don't want to bother hiring an architect and would rather design your perfect home yourself? Look no further than Home Designer Professional, the best thing for DIY home enthusiasts.
Coming from the stable of Chief Architect, Home Designer Professional offers a truckload of tools for interior design, remodeling, outdoor living and cost estimation. These have commonly accepted defaults for most building practices, and thus make creating your own project a cakewalk. Whether you want to create a single room or an entire house, Home Designer Professional can do it all. It lets you add cabinets, place furniture and even paint walls.
The software has an extensive library of 3D architecture objects that can be added to designs. You can rotate symbols in different planes, and choose to have the CAD block refresh automatically as objects are modified. It's possible to set heights by absolute or relative positions, and the program lets you reference adjacent floors for designing multi-tiered decks. You can customize room labels, edit multiple elements (e.g. all cabinets) together with one command, as well as create architectural blocks that can be moved as one and stored in the library. Other features include the ability to rotate and reverse plans, custom watermarks, live layout views and labeled callouts.
Home Designer Professional lets you backup the entire plan for easy sharing, set sun and shadow controls, record walkthroughs and more. There is a lot of CAD functionality thrown into the mix, too.
Best for Ease Of Use: Sweet Home 3D
Most of the home design programs are quite complicated and have a bit of a learning curve. That said, there are some that are fairly easy to use, and Sweet Home 3D is the best among them.
Using Sweet Home 3D, you can create straight, round or sloping walls with precise dimensions, with just your mouse and keyboard. The software lets you insert doors and windows in walls by simply dragging them in the plan. You can add furniture to your model using an extensive, searchable catalog, which is organized by categories such as kitchen, living room, bedroom and bathroom. For each added element (e.g. wall, floor), it's possible to change the color, texture, size, thickness, location and orientation. While designing the home in 3D, you can simultaneously view it in 3D from an aerial point of view, or navigate from a virtual visitor point of view. Sweet Home 3D lets you annotate the plan with room areas, dimension lines, texts and arrows. The program can even create photorealistic images and videos with its ability to customize the lights. You can import existing home blueprints to add upon them, and export created designs as PDFs and vector images.
The features of Sweet Home 3D can be enhanced using a variety of plug-ins. The program runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris.
Best for Landscaping: HGTV Home & Landscape Platinum Suite
There's no point in having the perfect home if it's not surrounded by plants and other forms of greenery. Landscaping is just as important (if not more), and to visualize it, you need a software that puts special emphasis on this crucial aspect of home design. Enter HGTV Home & Landscape Platinum Suite.
HGTV Home & Landscape Platinum Suite provides an easy way to plan your home's outdoor surroundings, exactly how you want them. From pathways and plants to decks and gazebos, you can customize anything and everything. The deck builder wizard makes it easy to create a new deck or patio, which can be then spruced up with plants, fences and much more.
Speaking of, HGTV's plant encyclopedia has reference information for more than 7,500 trees, plants, flowers, shrubs and groundcover options. It also contains information about the plants' light, water and soil requirements. For garden design, HGTV Home & Landscape Platinum Suite lets you add lighting to flowerbeds and pathways, and even insert pop-up sprinklers with varying spray ranges. You can scan digital photos of your yard to easily add garden design elements to them, and take a 3D tour it once done.
It's worth mentioning that HGTV lets you design home interiors too, and comes with many powerful design tools for the same.
Best Online: Space Designer 3D
If you think only desktop programs are great for home design, you couldn't be more wrong. Space Designer 3D is a web-based app that lets you plan and visualize your ideal home, using just your Web browser.
Getting started with Space Designer 3D is a walk in the park, and all you need is an account. The app lets you draw floor plans from basements to the roofs, and you can customize your interior design with more than 5,000 different furniture and materials, suitable for both residential and commercial use. The Web app makes it simple to visualize your created project in real-time, both in 2D and 3D. Space Designer 3D can simulate natural lighting realistically, depending upon the GPS coordinates and time of the day. Its rendering engine can transform 3D objects into photorealistic images with just a click, and levels are editable independently through the 2D floor plan visualization. It's possible to have multiple options for the design of the floor plan or interiors, which is why Space Designer 3D includes different versions of a single project, with the ability to quickly switch between multiple designs.
Space Designer 3D offers multiple plans, and you can choose the one that best suits your (or your organization's) needs.
Best for Mobile: Homestyler
Want to get some home planning done when you're on the move? There's no need to lug around a laptop, as your smartphone will do just fine. Just install Homestyler, and get started.
A powerful home design app, Homestyler offers a myriad of features. Simply take a photo of your space, and try out multiple wall colors, decor items and furniture products from actual brands. You cannot only place high-quality 3D models of different items in the virtual room but even hang light fixtures from the ceiling. The app makes it exceedingly simple to visualize different product combinations, and lets you see how realistic models of branded rugs, paintings, mirrors and more will look in your space. Since Homestyler is a community-based app, you can browse the designs submitted by other users to get some inspiration. Of course, you can also post your own creations and share them via e-mail and Facebook.
Homestyler is a free app, and available on both iOS and Android mobile platforms.
Best Splurge: Chief Architect Premier
Primarily geared towards professional architects and home planners, Chief Architect Premier is arguably the most comprehensive home design software you're going to come across. If budget isn't a concern, it's the best that there is, period.
Chief Architect Premier is fully capable of handling all types of residential and light commercial design projects. As you draw elements (e.g. walls), the software automatically creates a 3D model. It can generate a list of materials and use powerful building tools to produce construction documents, complete with site and framing plans, section details and elevations. Chief Architect Premier's 3D rendering and visualization features let you view created models from different angles. You can also explore 360-degree spherical views locally and in the cloud, as well as embed them in websites for interactive navigation. For cross sections and elevations, the software can add automatic labels and populate camera callouts with layout information. With nearly unlimited options for everything from rooms and walls to foundations and even electrical/HVAC systems, Chief Design Premier lets you make the most intricate home designs, with minimal effort.
The software has a vast catalog of 3D objects and lets you export/export data in a wide variety of formats. Chief Architect Premier is available for both PC and Mac.
The need for a backup solution cannot be stated enough, because of the risk of losing all your files, photos, music, and other important documents to an accident or computer crash.
There are many different options available for backing up. This might include copying files and folders to a rewritable CD or DVD, USB drive, or external harddrive, or even using a cloud-hosted solution so you can access and sync your files and folders between different devices.
While it's great if you're using even one method, it's even more ideal if you're using multiple backup methods to provide a real and practical degree of redundancy. However, doing so might make it more difficult to manage your backups.
This is where backup software really comes into play, as it allows you to more easily manage and automate backing up tasks, allowing you to just let everything run and save in the background while you're working.
There are a number of paid-for back software solutions available, but even better is that there are also free versions available so you can discover for yourself which software fits best for you.
Here then we'll take a look at the best in free backup software.
- We also compiled the list of best online photo storage services
- It is advisable to keep a local copy of your files, so check out our best NAS devices
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1. EaseUS Todo Backup Free
A perfect balance of automatic protection and manual control
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EaseUS Todo Backup Free has lots of bases covered: backing up individual files and folders, whole drives or partitions, or creating a full system backup. There's also a 'smart' option that automatically backs up files in commonly used locations, and you have the option of using cloud storage.
Backups can then be scheduled, running as incremental, differential or full backups as required (see below for a full explanation of the differences).
The free version of EaseUS Todo Backup free has almost all the features of the premium edition. You can still run backups on a schedule, but lose the ability to have these backups triggered by various events – not something most people will miss. The same goes for command line-driven backups, PC-to-PC data transfer, and Outlook backup; they're all nice to have, but their absence is unlikely to be a deal-breaker.
A few features are exclusive the the premium version, but EasusUS Todo Backup Free is more than enough for just about everyone out there.
You'll be offered a free download of the Chromium browser and a Bing search plugin during installation. If you'd rather skip these, uncheck both boxes before clicking 'Next'
2. Cobian Backup
Advanced backup software for experienced and confident users
Cobian Backup is the most advanced free backup tool around, and might be overkill for new users, but if you know exactly how you want to configure your backups then you can be confident it'll give you the flexibility you need.
Cobian Backup can be used to create and schedule multiple backup jobs, and files can be archived to another local hard drive, network location or, if you have access to one, an FTP server. It can back up to multiple locations at the same time, so it's possible to run multiple backup jobs simultaneously.
Backups can be compressed to save space, and there's optional encryption to keep your data secure.
Cobian Backup loses when it comes time to restore data – there's no simple wizard to automate the process, so you're left on your own having to copy files back into place, decrypting and decompressing first if necessary.
Still, for backing up your most valuable data, this is one of the most comprehensive tools out there.
3. Paragon Backup & Recovery
The easiest way to back up your system – just set and forget
Paragon Backup & Recovery does an excellent job of making the process of backing up as simple as possible, holding your hand with a wizard-driven interface. You can opt to back up your entire computer, partitions, select files and folders based on location, or files based on their type.
Once that's done, just set a schedule and choose the type of backup you want to want to create and then leave the software to take care of things by itself.
That's not all – as the latter portion of its name suggests, this isn't just a backup tool. Paragon Backup & Recovery is a whole data management toolkit, and also includes an impressive CD or USB-based recovery system that can be used to get your data back even if you're not able to boot into Windows.
It's all very impressive. Once you've signed up for a free account, this free backup software is a thing of beauty.
4. FBackup
FBackup offers advanced and simple modes, with easy scheduling
FBackup has a slightly unappealing (and Office-inspired) interface, but don’t let that put you off. Beneath the ugly exterior is a capable backup utility, although it isn't as feature backed as tools like Paragon Backup & Recovery.
FBackup offers a choice of wizard and advanced modes. Whichever you choose, it's easy to create backup jobs comprising files and folders, which can be saved to local or network drives, removable disks, or Google Drive. Scheduling is available to keep your backups up to date.
There are in-program ads suggesting you upgrade to the paid-for Backup4all, but thankfully they are relatively unobtrusive so hopefully you'll be able to ignore them if you're not interested.
The free version of the program lacks a few features, but these might be inconsequential, depending on your needs. If you can live without encryption, FTP backups, email notifications and incremental backups, Fbackup is well worth checking out.
5. Google Backup and Sync
A new backup tool that uses Google Drive to store your files
Google Backup and Sync isn't a traditional backup tool by any means, it is cloud-based and just what you are able to back up will depend on how much online Google storage you have available.
You're given a limited amount of space for free, and there are various ways to boost it without having to part with any money, but in reality Google Backup and Sync is going to be useful for backing up individual directories – not your whole system.
For backing up key files and folders, however, it's superb. You can easily specify any number of folders for the software to monitor, and any changes, additions or deletions are implemented near-instantaneously.
As the name suggests, the software can be used to synchronize files between computers, and they are accessible through on any device via the Google Drive web app. An excellent, if slightly limited, backup tool.
Choosing the best cloud backup provider
Noam Shendar, Cloud GM at Zadara, reckons these are the most important questions to ask when choosing a cloud storage provider:
1. Do you offer cloud, on-premise and hybrid storage? One model doesn't fit all, some enterprises might prefer an on-premises, while other will opt for a hybrid model. The ideal cloud provider should offer both, so you can enjoy the advantages of the cloud as well as those of on-site data storage.
2. How do you tackle ‘noisy neighbours’? The last thing you want is for another customer, or noisy neighbour, to be hogging all of the available resources of your cloud environment and affect your performance. Make sure your cloud provider has a solution for this, ideally by isolating your neighbour’s storage from yours so that they cannot affect each other.
3. Do you support all types of data? It’s important for you to have the flexibility and remember that not all cloud providers are able to store block, file, and object data.
4. What is your pricing structure? You shouldn’t pay for storage that you’re not using. Whether your storage is in the cloud, onsite, or hybrid, only pay for what you actually use.
5. What security measures do you use? It’s crucial for your data centre to have both cyber security but also physical security measures. Security should be baked into a cloud solution, from the ground up and inside out.
Understanding backup types
When you're choosing backup software it's worth understanding the different types of backups.
An image is an exact copy of an entire drive or partition, including all installed programs and system files. If you need to reinstall Windows, you can boot from the image file and avoid having to reinstall all your programs and reconfigure your Windows settings. Note that you can't use an image to restore your system on a different PC.
Images are very large and take a long time to create, so you won't want to make one every day. For everyday backups, you'll only want to copy the most important data on your PC – your documents, photos and music, for example. There are several types of regular backup:
- Full backup: a copy of all selected data.
- Differential backup: a copy of the data that has changed or been added since the last full backup.
- Incremental backup: a copy of the data that has changed since the last backup, whether that was full backup or incremental.
Each differential backup will be larger than the last, but to restore your system you'll only need the full backup and the latest differential one. Incremental backup files are smaller, but to restore your system you'll need your full backup as well as all subsequent incremental ones, which takes longer.
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