A fast and easy way to perform backups on a regular basis or on the fly.
Summary
| Our Score | Our Score  |
| License | Free (Limited features) |
| Link | AOMEI Backupper Standard |
| Lots of features, supports GPT, System Restore, Incremental and Differential backup, AES Encryption. | |
| No user editable options for reinstating the MBR or not. |
Details
If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to perform backups on a regular basis or even on the fly, then AOMEI Backupper offers exactly that. If you like to get in and configure every setting possible pertaining to creating a drive image, then you are better off choosing an alternative imaging program. This is actually my imaging program of choice after using all the others off and on for years. Not that there is anything wrong with the others, it is just that I am not bombarded with multiple questions with AOMEI. I can just click a few times and be confident that it is going to do what I expect it to do without the possibility of me accidentally selecting the wrong crucial option during recovery (yes, I have done that a few times in the past and even invited some new cuss words post broken system restore).
Primary Backup Options
AOMEI Backupper is ideal for both the novice and advanced user alike, with a very clean user friendly GUI. The primary backup options are Disk Backup, Partition Backup, System Backup, and File and Folder Backup. We are also presented with some good options for all the backup modes, like the ability to create comments about the backup, select levels of compression, whether or not to encrypt, the ability to split large backups, whether or not to optimize sectors during backup and the option for Shadow Copying aka VSS, support for UEFI boot and GPT disks, along with Incremental and Differential backup modes.
The type of compression or encryption which uses AES is not optional but in my opinion that is not an important factor, unless you are extremely short on drive space or work for some Government Agency.
Many of the essential functions that are missing in the free versions of other programs are included in AOMEI Backupper free edition without any “nag” screens to upgrade to pro either. Within a few clicks of the mouse, you can have your system backup in progress. It is intuitive and has detected my 100MB System Reserved partition without problem and offered to include it into the system backup.
Image Creation and Recovery
Both the backup and recovery process are very fast taking only about 9 minutes for my 8GB system partition! The options are available for where you want to recover the image to. NAS (network storage) is also supported.
There are no options pertaining to reinstating the MBR that could cause some major problems in a multi-boot environment. However, this can be overcome by selecting not to do a system restore and just restore the actual partition that contains Windows itself. Obviously I am thinking in terms of the more advanced user here. In my opinion AOMEI does not need those options as it handles them perfectly well by itself without user interaction in normal situations.
There are utilities for checking file integrity and creating WinPE and Linux bootable rescue media, along with the ability to mount, browse and recover files or folders from an existing image. The only service it installs on your system is its own backup scheduler service. If you are not using scheduled backups, then it is safe to set this service to “manual”. The scheduled backups in the free version, however, do not manage drive space on the target drive in the way of deleting old backups. This feature, along with the ability to merge multiple incremental backups into one, is reserved for the paid-for version only. No complaints with that, they can’t give away everything for free.
The new version has added the ability to schedule the synchronization of files and folders automatically to HDD, USB and NAS.