One of the worst things that could happen to a computer user is losing the contents of the Windows drive, whether it’s through corruption, self inflicted damage or hardware issues. If it’s not bad enough to have to reinstall Windows again afterwards and then, any personal files will also have been lost as well if they were not backed up beforehand.

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Experienced users will always recommend keeping a copy of your Windows drive or at least your documents and other files safe at another location, as it might not be possible to.The backup method known as drive imaging is one of the most effective ways to keep a backup copy of your whole Windows drive safe in case disaster strikes. Drive imaging simply copies the whole structure and contents of a drive or partition, then compresses the content into a file which you can save to CD/DVD/BDR, the cloud or onto another hard drive or USB flash drive. This can be on a clean install or after several years of use, Windows and its contents will be restored back to the point in time you created the image.As your Windows in size, it makes sense to find a program which does a good job of both compressing the image to a smaller size and not taking too long to complete this task. The backup software market is quite competitive so how do you know who’s the most efficient at creating a backup image? In this article we’ve put a number of free and paid backup software applications to the test to find out who’s fast at backing up a Windows drive, for the backup image and who’s the best at restoring the images back to the hard drive.

Below we have listed all the imaging software used in the tests, there are 20 in total. Along with price if it isn’t free, we’ve displayed which backup methods are supported and a few selected features. To find the full feature list for a specific program, please visit its website. If you want to skip straight to find out who did what in our tests and the summary, go straight to.1. Acronis True Image 2014Acronis True is probably the most popular and well known commercial backup software around, and with recent versions they are offering support for syncing backups to their cloud storage service. The standard version suffices for most users needs, features like restore to different hardware are only in the premium version.Price: Standard $49.99, Premium $79.99Supported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: Backup/restore using NAS or Acronis Cloud Storage, Try&Decide, AES encryption, dynamic volume support, restore to different hardware, file backup and drive cloning, F11 startup recovery manager, boot sequence manager, backup image converter.2.

Acronis True Image WD Edition / Seagate DiscWizardHard drive makers Seagate and Western Digital both have a cut down and slightly older version of Acronis True Image available to use for free, provided you have an internal or external hard drive from that manufacturer connected. Many features are disabled but you can still create/restore images and clone hard drives etc.Price: FreeSupported Backup Methods: FullSelected Features: Mount image as virtual drive, DriveCleanser, rescue media builder, clone drives, 2TB extended capacity manager, add new hard disc, TRIM your SSD, recover individual files and folders.Download 3. Active@ Disk Image 6Disk Image also comes on LSoft’s famous utility boot disk and there’s also a free Lite version although it is severely restricted and doesn’t even have the facility to create a recovery CD/USB. You need the Pro or Standard versions to use offline recovery and incremental imaging etc.Price: Free (Lite version), Standard $39, Pro $69Supported Backup Methods: Full (Incremental/Differential in paid versions only)Selected Features: scripting support, schedule incremental backups, AES encryption, email notifications, drive cloning.4. AOMEI Backupper 1.6AOMEI is quite new to the backup business but Backupper is free for both personal and commercial use and has a feature set that puts many paid applications to shame.

It’s one of the only free programs we found that is able to perform both differential and incremental backups, run schedules and offer Linux or WinPE recovery media.Price: Free for personal and commercial useSupported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: GPT partition and UEFI BIOS support, backup/restore using NAS or network, backup scheduling, dynamic volume and RAID support, one click system backup, drive cloning, image explorer and integrity checker.5. AX64 Time Machine 1.4AX64’s strong point is its ease of use because its aim is to be more of a snapshot type program that uses full and incremental imaging for the purpose. This makes it simple to setup and operate but it also means AX64 is not as fully featured or configurable as traditional imaging applications.

You pay for simplicity and efficiency.Price: $39.95Supported Backup Methods: Full and IncrementalSelected Features: Manual/hourly scheduled incremental backups, recover from boot menu or media, mount backups as virtual drives, recover individual files/folders, advanced restore settings, ability to restore Windows partition from within Windows.6. Clonezilla 2.2Considering it’s a bit complicated to get to grips with because of the text only interface, Clonezilla is a capable and popular backup tool.

It does only perform full backups though and there are not many other features available, being Linux based means Clonezilla doesn’t work from Windows and is usable from boot media only.Price: FreeSupported Backup Methods: FullSelected Features: UEFI boot and GPT partition support, unattended mode, huge number of file systems supported, restore to several devices at once, SE version can be used for mass cloning.7. Drive Snapshot 1.43Drive Snapshot is a tiny and optionally portable imaging utility that can be used from any Windows to backup and restore your drives or partitions. There are extensive command line options to control functions over and above those found in the GUI. The most recent version has added support for Windows 8/8.1 and GPT partitions.Price: From €39Supported Backup Methods: Full, DifferentialOther Selected Features: DOS restore disc, RAID compatible, Auto empty trash, disc encryption, Command Line interface, backup/restore using FTP, restore to new hardware option, mount image as virtual drive.8. DriveImage XML 2.5Made by Runtime Software who also develop the GetDataBack recovery software, DriveImage XML is quite basic and can perform full drive/partition backups only. Images are stored in XML files meaning you can access them directly with other tools if you wish.

A separate Knoppix Live boot disc is available for offline functions.Price: Free for personal useSupported Backup Methods: FullSelected Features: Drive to drive cloning, scheduling (via Windows Task Scheduler), 550MB utility boot disc available with many Runtime tools included.9. EaseUS Todo Backup 6.5Todo has been around a little while now and the free version is able to create drive images and also incremental images, something very few free backup applications can do. Futures and options pdf in tamil. The latest version of Todo can also backup your Android devices. Paid versions include advanced options like remote management and recover to different hardware.Price: Free, Home $29, Workstation $39Supported Backup Methods: Full and Incremental (Differential in paid versions only)Selected Features: One-click system backup and restore, GPT and RAID support, Outlook backup and recovery, recover to dissimilar hardware, migrate system to virtual machine, differential backup, schedule backup, remote control.10. FarStone TotalRecovery 10 ProThe FarStone backup software is loaded with features and also includes a 3 minute Rapid restore, which actually isn’t a full restore, more like a differential restore mode.

TotalRecovery also supports more advanced features such as VMware and Hyper-V, universal restore and built in defragger.Price: $44.95Supported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: Support MBR, GPT, BIOS and UEFI, one-click Backup/Restore, disk defrag during backup, Scheduler, backup to NAS, network and FTP, file/folder backup, AES encryption, restore to dissimilar hardware, recovery manager on boot.11. Image for Windows by Terabyte Unlimited 2.87Although Image for Windows is not difficult to use, it does have tons of options and tick boxes that might confuse less experienced users a little. The program has many of the useful features found in other backup software such as restore to different hardware, large drive (GPT) support and comprehensive command line support.Price: $38.94Supported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: AES backup encryption, GPT, network and RAID support, restore files or folders, command line support, scheduling (via Windows Task Scheduler), drive copy, works with server versions of Windows also.12. Macrium Reflect 5.2Reflect is generally considered as a solid and reliable product, the free version although slightly limited is one of the most popular free imaging programs around. Paid versions offer differential/incremental backup, file backup and restore to dissimilar hardware among other things. WinPE or Linux rescue media is available.Price: Free, Standard $44.99, Pro $58.99Supported Backup Methods: Full (Incremental and Differential in paid versions only)Selected Features: Restore to different hardware, GPT support, drive cloning, file/folder backup, email notifications, recover from Windows boot menu, schedules and scripting support. 13.

O&O DiskImage Professional 8O&O Software produce a lot of very well known and easy to use tools, and DiskImage Pro aims to follow this trend. Most of the standard features found in other commercial and shareware backup applications are available, including the three main types of backup, a file/folder backup mode and restoring to different hardware.Price: $29.95Supported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: Create VHD images directly, scheduling via Windows Task Scheduler, one click imaging, drive cloning, dynamic disc, GPT and UEFI support, restore from virtual disks, save to network, start job on connection.14. Paragon Backup and Recovery 14For their free Backup and Recovery, Paragon offers a lot of features not found in many other software. These include Differential imaging and scheduling and also some basic hard drive partitioning functions. The Home edition also has incremental backup support, FTP, auto partition alignment and restore to different hardware.Price: Free, Home $39.95Supported Backup Methods: Full, Differential and Incremental. This differs depending on whether you use the standard backup format or the new Virtual Disc format, see Test Notes on page 2 for more information.Selected Features: Smart Backup, Selective Restore, basic partitioning features, partition alignment, drive cloning, migrate Windows to different hardware, scheduling and scripting, GPT, UEFI and dynamic disc support, recovery disc requires registering.Visit/Download 15.

R-Drive Image 5.2R-tools make quite a few utilities including the also well known R-Studio recovery suite. For a commercial product Drive Image isn’t loaded with killer features but it does have an easy to use wizard driven interface to help make the process easier. The results from previous tests weren’t great, maybe it does better this time?Price: $44.95Supported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: ReFS file system and GPT support, scheduler and script creator, drive cloning, mount image as virtual drive, backup/restore over network.16. Redo Backup 1.04Redo is a no fuss and easy to use bootable Linux disc that enables you to backup or restore both Windows and Linux machines from a bootable CD or USB. There’s also a few useful tools found on the Linux disc to partition, wipe or recover data from your drives.Price: FreeSupported Backup Methods: FullOther Selected Features: backup/restore using network, internet access from the live disc plus several other drive related utilities.17. StorageCraft ShadowProtect Desktop 5Being the most expensive single product here, ShadowProtect has a reputation for being a fast and efficient backup solution. It also includes more advanced features like virtual environment support and remote management.

The ShadowProtect Recovery Environment ISO is a separate free download for registered users.Price: $99.95Supported Backup Methods: Full, Incremental and DifferentialSelected Features: Schedule backups and incremental backups, restore to different hardware or virtual environments, repair boot errors or drive corruption, backup encryption, convert backups into virtual discs, remote notifications.18. Symantec System Recovery 2013 DesktopSymantec System Recovery is the replacement for the long time favorite backup tool after it was discontinued, Norton Ghost. This program though is a massive 700MB download and that doesn’t include another 800+MB for the recovery media. It does though have several features you would expect from an established brand.Price: $84.87Supported Backup Methods: Full and IncrementalSelected Features: backup to external drive, NAS, SAN, Blu-ray, network share or FTP, virtual P2V and V2P conversion, recover files and folders, scheduling system, AES encryption, UEFI support.19. Windows System ImageSince Vista, an option has been available in Windows called System Image to needed for Windows to boot. It’s very basic and doesn’t include anything much in the way of features, but it is a free built in imaging tool and at least gives the option for different backup locations.Price: FreeSupported Backup Methods: FullOther Selected Features: Can use Windows, a recovery disc or the Windows install DVD to restore images, backup to hard disc, USB, optical media or network, built into Windows Vista, 7, 8, 8.1 as standard.On page 2 you’ll find out how we tested, the results of our tests and the summary of who did what. Been deploying machines for years 1,000’s of them.

Ghost for many years until I stopped using it when it did not support larger than 2tb. Moved on to active disk image the clone feature was unreliable at best, that did not matter too much because imaging was my main use. 1 image many to machines it worked 99.9% of the time. I threw in aomei in the mix because it was free and had a great interface so I recommended it to many customers even though they had to pay for the server version. Since windows 10 1909 update nothing but problems. With active image and clone both render non bootable drives when you try the new drives. Aomei image stopped working but clone works sometimes.

It is like Microsoft found a way to spoil the pot. Anybody else run into this? Hi, Hal/Raaymomd.cc!Please, when (2019) you would make some notes about some of these softwares.I apprecciate your site very very much (of course there are many factors for a complete review and each one could fail,depending on the user, etc (I am a newbie from Brazil – sorry for my english).You know: there are a lot of sites that even tell anything about Paragon 17 (or 16).For easy work and very well reliable, I am among Acronis new, 2019, AOMEI, Paaragon, Ease US Todo. Some says Macrium is too easy, others is difficult, and so on abaout the main others softs.I intendo to my Windows 7, H. Premium, 64 bits, Desktop, I adore (and soon Microsoft cancel all support – at present I have to pay for an annual support and here in my city Recife, northeast of Brazil, is too much difficult meet a good technician really to rare for a newbie like me).kind regards, and congratullation,Humberto—————————. Great Review.Results echo my experience with the limited backup utilities I have used used.Very quickly abandoned Symantec backup products.Clonezilla my go to app for full system backups/snapshots.Aomei WAS was goto program for backups and restore including the odd system backup.

I did run into problems with Aomei aborting file backups with lots of files (800gb photos) due to lack of memory resource.Easeus backup was able to takeover where Aomei could not.Offline restore (boot able winPE) from Easeus is very noticeably slower then aomei.Note that aomei drive imaging provides ease for virtual mount of the drive image. Very handy feature. You can do same with clonezilla images in linux but a bit more of a pain. Nice review, however very stale. Windows 8 test bed?

How about W10? Macrium Reflect 5? Acronis 2014? Now 2018 (ugh, hate that type of marketing versioning; doesn’t really tell you much about what really changed; you know you will get a new version each year regardless of what actually changed).

Other examples abound. Like that you show when last updated in header, but text and data reads much older.But, great effort and much appreciated. Well written, but should be proofed with “today’s glasses” on to bring it current. We should have data about how heavy the apps are to the system.

We have Macrium that only run 1 process with 2MB of RAM, and then we have Acronis that use 8 processes with 22MB of RAM.For backing up my Hackintosh HDD (HFS+ partitions) I will keep using R-Drive. Knows how to keep the bootload intact and can backup only useful information of a HFS+ partition. So in a 250GB HDD if I have to rely on Macrium I end up with a 200GB backup, if I use R-Drive I get a 90GB backup, which is just the backup of the data and not empty space that I have in the HDD.

What about XXClone? The free version do an amazing job, is very fast and have very much features.

And for what you need a “Restore” function when you can always simply clone the OS back from your stored backup without the lost of any function or feature? XXClone can make a 100% 1:1 copy/backup from all Windows OS what you can clone/copy back so often you want.

This means you can clone a OS from any source to any disk inside or outside from your computer – even with a USB to USB connection between 2 computers. Only when your source is on a USB drive you need the Pro version.

Come here to see the rank since I was using Todo for years and was satisfied BUT last week I found that lot of Todo so called successful backup are in fact incomplete and miss a lot of folders/files especially in with incremental backup.I run my backups daily and I need RELIABILITY and it was since last week I was trying to understand why I was missing some data in my backup since the log file was “sucessful”??? It is that it’s the process that is successful NOT the image file. You can check the image file MANUAL:LY AFTER the backup is doneIt’s crazy in 2015 it should be automated and moreover to have this bug that miss files/folders especially on incremental backup is terrible.

I do my backup each day to be sure that I will not lose time in case of a crashUsing Todo backup is like playing “Roulette Russe” you don’t know if your backup is complete untill you need it.:(So tomorrow I switch to AOMEI solution at least I will be able to check AUTOMATICALLY if the image are perfect, no worry in case of crash and peace of mind.:). I really “wanted” to like AOMEI and to be fair, the freeware backup and partition tools they provide have worked well. But even for PAID users, their forum based support is horrendous. Perhaps (hopefully) their email support for paid customers is far superior?But either way, they provide a PEBuilder product for free, which does a job none of their other products do – which is to build a bootable WinPE recovery image you can burn to optical disc or USB media, which can provide a recovery environment that includes BOTH their backup and partition tools.

I recently needed to transfer a Win XP system to another drive. This Win XP system had been (re)installed about a year ago with much aggravation due to the age of my original disks and the various SP updates. I wanted to transfer this system to a new hard drive and make a reliable copy to not have to reinstall again (which I am concerned may not be doable at some point).

My goal was to simply duplicate a 100GB drive onto a 320 GB drive.should be easy right.1) Tried DriveImage XLM v2.5. Target disk would not boot (DMI Pool ).2) Clonezilla. Again the target disk would not boot, it would hang during what should have been the boot time. I tried various menu options with no success.With both the above I tried to prepare up the target drive using various partition managersincluding windows own disk management system. But no go.3) Easus Todo Free. Worked great 1st time.

I have since purchased the Home version because they deserve to be paid for a good product.Clearly others have not had my issue so what ever the cause Easus was able to succeed where (some) others failed. I have no proof but I feel the use of the windows PE environment for the restore function might be key.RegardsJohnRob. The reliable Windows partiton backup is the built-in Windows System Backup from the Control Panel (in Windows 8: System 7 recovery, in Windows 8.1 File History there Disk Image, in Windows 7: Backup and Restore or so). It works decremental (creating old deltas in shadow space, pushing out older deltas).For File Backup I recommend reliably Easeus ToDo Backup, (but not-not-not for Windows partition backup and not for bootable WinPE Recovery Disks. The latter are well known to fail when needed).For Emergency Backup I have no recommendation, I do not know a reliable tool for Windows 7 and more recent.The recommended tools never failed for me and I loaded them heavily and a dozen times. Very nice comparison.If you plan for an upgrade of this test it would be nice if you could add these checks:– Does the application make full use of the cores which the CPU offers? Is it configurable?– Whats the average backup time and i/o performance when doing the disk imageuncompressed / using normal compressionI have a Xeon 1650v3 and doing full disk images from Samsung SSD 850 Pro to Seagate 3TB Sata6 disk.With the latest Macrium and Paragon demo version if have to say that these programs are dog slow and only utilize 2-3 cores of my CPU.

Compared to that Acronis TIH 2012 makes use of every thread of the 6 cores / 12 threads of my CPU.– Is the Bootable medium able to do diskimages or limited to do only restores?I do not want to install Acronis makes to many things in the system, I dislike that.I was glad in the past being able to make backups using the Boot and Recovery media.With Macrium I notieced besides the bad performance and CPU utilization, that it can only restore.– I would raise as a key requirement, that the Boot and Recovery CD needs to be able to make backups and restores. If your system does not boot anymore, you need a medium which backups the status “as-is” before your start doing recovery activities, which can make situation even worse. For this reason Macrium is a “no-go”.– Test with new Chipsets, i.e. Intel C612.The Acronis Boot and Recovery Disk doesnt recognize USB Keyboard and Mouse when using it on my new system. So the Linux version which they use is too old.

I need to look if using Win PE environment copies maybe more drivers over from Windows, so that I maybe get my old Acronis 2011 version running, where I have the PLUS version for Win PE supprot. Very nice comparison!Especially comparing clearly main features like incremental,differential or scheduler.Too bad no one can test reliability;)I remember years ago when Acronis left me on the road with a non recoverable backupwhereas the self validation said it was a valid backup.It was probably an USB driver bug.So if you REALLY want to know if you recovery software works, you need to recover several times to know it. And most non-pro never recover until their computer crash. And they learn the hard way their backup is not recoverableWhat is the point of making backups if you can’t trust them? That’s why backup software are growing everywhere: no one can REALLY know if they work right.My advice: try to use at least two backup solutionsif their engines don’t conflict:D. Best is AOMEI Backupper 1.6, encrypts the backup but once a restore is done you do have to run another program to set the partition to active to have it boot. But for free with the encrypted backup, can’t beat it.

If your operating system with all the registered to the programs you bought, is not important the Free WD-Acronis is super great and super fast. If your computer doesnt crash constantly and have to be re-authenticated constantly just buy the full backup from Acronis as well for more hdd wiping options ect. Thanks for the test, always nice to read.

You should have tested at least one product also with other OS-environments to see whether different OSS yield different results. I recently used Macrium Reflect in XP (to use and store some still unused licenses for possible future use) on several machines and found it to be very, very slow. Also Paragon BR14compact on W7 did not impress me with its speed, Shadow Protect on the other hand worked like a charm. Apparently test results from W8.1 are just results from W8.1 and they don’t necessarily mean much for other OSS. Although I would have liked to run the full test in 3 OS’s, the huge amounts of time involved meant that simply wasn’t an option.

To take just one product and test it would have not been fair, what happens if we accidentally pick one that works far far better/worse in one OS than another? That would give everyone the false impression they all do that.We simply chose Windows 8.1 because it is the current OS you go and buy in the shops with a new machine, Win 8 and Win 7 are very similar anyway because we did run a couple of small tests when looking at the software. You’ll probably find the vast majority of performance tests on the internet, whether it’s testing hardware or software, use only one operating system, and it’s often the latest one. One essential feature that you either didn’t look into or weren’t clear about is restoring to drives of different size. Is that what you mean when you by “dissimilar hardware”? Could you expand on what you mean specifically.Restoring to the same drive/partition is trivial. Restoring to a larger drive/partition is fairly easy.

Restoring to a smaller drive/partition is a challenge. Although it may seem silly to need that as drive prices are cheap, it does happen. As of a few years back, there was no free driving imaging software that could restore to a smaller drive/partition and only one or two commercial ones. Has that changed? As this article is about imaging size and speed, we didn’t want to go into detail about functions and features of the backup applications, just list a few select things each program can do, if you want to know more visit the software website.As far as I know, most of the major backup programs can restore to different partition sizes, bigger or smaller. The “dissimilar hardware” phrase usually means that you can take an image on one computer and restore it on another computer, irrespective of what the HDD/Motherboard/CPU/RAM specs are. In the old days, this would be not be possible or cause a BSOD because of the hard drive controller being different.

I’m currently researching what product I wish to buy for my personal use. And, I’ve noticed some additional information.I have heard of one important feature of ShadowProtect that you’ve failed to mention. (Note: My information may be dated, but comes from PC Magazine, so should be reasonably reliable.)Changing a motherboard or video card, but keeping your old drive can leave you with a computer that won’t boot without a complete strip-down and re-installation of Windows. (I know this from personal experience.) According to PC Magazine, Storagecraft has found a way to deal with these hardware issues and incorporated it into ShadowProtect. And, apparently none of the others have such a feature. When the other products mention hardware independence, they are speaking of the disk drive and not the full system.Thus, if you wish to upgrade your system hardware (especially the motherboard) without changing over your familiar drive setup, you may want to take an extra look at ShadowProtect.Also, as I understand it, Paragon’s full Disk Manager Suite (more expensive) reportedly contains the most comprehensive set of tools currently out there and the price has dropped dramatically.

If you need addtional partitioning tools, you may want to look at that. Disk Manager Suite includes Drive Backup.I saw Power Quest Drive Image 7 mentioned in the above comments. My work also used Drive Image and never had a problem with it. However, that product was purchased by Symantec a long time ago and became the basis of Norton Ghost 9.0. We switched to Acronis at the time, as we’d found a significant system performance penalty installing any Symantec product. We had little problem with Acronis, but the version we were using was not the easiest to use. Hi Raymond,Thanks for the unbiased review on Disk Imaging software.

There are many different programs to choose from but i prefer Acronis TrueImage.I used to use PowerQuest DriveImage 7 (WinXP only!) and never had any issues. I have used Acronis TrueImage for a couple of years now. It is very easy to use and i have never had any problems or corrupted restore images. When using the bootable recovery CD, i always save my backup images to a 16GB USB flash stick and always set it to “validate the image file” if it passes then i burn them to a DVD-RW later when i have time and validate the burnt DVD just to make sure it’s ok, then i delete the file on my USB stick.Regards,Jon. Nice blog entry!

I suggest you expand this in the future with some serious testing details. When evaluating some of these products, we quickly realized that incremental backup capability was a necessity for our business, because our servers became unacceptably unresponsive without incrementals. Differentials were not even acceptable. This narrowed the field quite a bit for us, to those few which support quick incremental backups. A home computer may not be seriously affected by such slowdowns, but businesses should keep this effect in mind – incrementals are the only decent option. There are other concerns too, with incrementals.

Even worse, no plutonium isotope exists that could be used to dilute the plutonium removed from bombs to make a chain reaction impossible. What does bombs away mean today.

Some products have serious problems with incrementals (read their support websites). We found in our tests only the StorageCraft ShadowProtect product was consistently reliable for incremental imaging. However we are using Server 2003, and even StorageCraft has had some issues with incrementals as they just released an update to fix some issues which are mainly seen on Vista and Server 2008 and Windows 7 and Server 2008R2. I would be very interested in hearing about the experiences of other users who are using StorageCraft ShadowProtect on Windows 7 and Server 2008R2. We will be migrating in the near future to these platforms and would like to know if the ShadowProtect incremental backups are working correctly on these platforms with their latest 3.5.1 release. Nice article, thanks.

I’ve been researching backup software for a few months now, and I would recommend reviewing Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery next time around. It’s my second choice behind Acronis.EMC Retrospect (with the Disaster Recovery add-on) is another option I tested, but the recovery process is too flaky for serious use. The next version announced supposedly has a revamped PE-based recovery system, at which time it would be worth a second look (the Retrospect UI is very flexible.). Here’s my own review, from experience.

As a Windows 7 64-bit user, I used every single one of these backups at one time or another and I can tell you, from experience, the two most reliable and fastest are Active@ Boot Disk and Macrium. I never had a problem backing up with them.

I never had a problem restoring with them no matter how bad I screwed up my computer. Just use the WinPE rescue disk with Macrium, the Linux based one doesn’t work on Windows 7.With all the others They either lack essential features or I’ve run into problems backing up or restoring.Acronis has every feature imaginable including backing up an image to a VMWare virtual machine. However, sometimes when you want to restore using their Linux bases rescue disk, it won’t recognize the external hard drive I have my backups in. They say to use a WinPE disk but creating one is complicated and I could never manage to make one that works.

So with Acronis, if my computer happens not to boot up, I’m screwed.DriveClone is SLOW as a turtle and it also has drive recognition problems with their Linux based rescue disk.Norton doesn’t support Windows 7 which is what I use. Back in the day, I used the excellent Norton Ghost 2003, the grandaddy of them all.O&O is actually very stable, has backup and restore speeds, and its rescue disk works well. But it doesn’t have the feature to backup individual files.Paragon is like Acronis. Loaded with features. But the backup is as SLOW as a turtle. Takes forever.

In fact, its the slowest backup I ever used. Differential backups get as big as the full backups and take longer. What’s the sense of having a differential backup then? Might as well do a full all the time.R-Drive is missing essential features, incremental/differential, and file backup.Windows backup is missing essential features, incremental/differential, and file backup. If you happen to restore a such a system files backup after you install software, that software will be broken. Only good thing is you can use your Windows installation disk as a rescue disk.

Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for having such a limited backup on their excellent Windows 7.StorageCraft. Well respected with an excellent reputation. Very stable and reliable with many features.

Reliable rescue disk. The backup software most used in companies by system administrators. Raymond made a mistake in his chart. Storage Craft (ShadowProtect) does have “Constant Backup”.

In fact, it is completely “Constant Backup”based. Unfortunately there is no option to schedule backups manually, which is why I don’t use it. If it did, this would be my backup software for sure.

I don’t like having automatic constant backups done in the background, it takes up a lot of space plus you’d be backing up stuff you screwed up, and viruses and trojans and what not.That’s it. I hope this helps people in choosing a backup software. Here it is in a nutshell:For the best paid back up software, go with Acronis True Image.I have used Acronis for several years and can’t be more than happy with it. It is true that in previous versions, image corruption was a problem, but that issue has since been fixed.For the best free back up software, go with Paragon.

Paragon is very similiar to Acronis, although a tad bit slower. But hell, its free.Now, I think many people use back up imaging software wrongly. What you are supposed to do ideally is to reinstall your os, make the necessary updates, install all the programs you use, then make a backup of that hard drive (in its pristine state).

If you do this (and you only need to do it 1 time), the time it takes to back up is really fast and the time it takes to restore is faster to. Everyone should be making back up copies of their data and placing it on a cd or dvd. Such data should NOT be part of the incremental back up image or the disk image itself.

There are plenty of sites offering installation and troubleshooting advice for Mac OS 8.5 – at least for the Power Mac user. Since neither Apple Computer nor Umax Corporation provides any support for Mac OS 8.5 on SuperMacs, this page exists to cover problems specifically noted by users of the Umax SuperMac series of Macintosh compatible computers.Hard Drive Crashes and Data LossFWB has not endorsed Hard Disk Toolkit 2.0.6 for, let alone 8.5, preferring that the user buy 2.5.3 or later, which is certified by FWB for Mac OS 8.5. However, 2.0.6 does appear to work with 8.1 – it’s working just fine on my with a Quantum Fireball 2.1GB drive.