AOMEI Data Backuper 1.0

I think so

 

I decided to send Macrium Reflect to the bench.

I'm giving this one a go once again.

So far, much better experience than before

Everything seems to be working now.

I like the following:

• No unnecessary background service/process running all the time
• When it is running, it runs light
• Fast to make a backup
• Great interface
• Easy to navigate
• Nice features
• Fantastic Online Tutorials - I give two thumbs up to the person who created the well laid out tutorial system/Help topics.

Like I said, everything seems to be working.

If it continues to work, this might replace Macrium Reflect for me.

 

Ugh, nevermind...spoke too soon.

First test Backup & Restore = Flawless

Second and beyond test Backup & Restore = Flawed

Step 1 - Backup = Works great
Step 2 - Restore (From Windows) = Works great
Step 3 - Restore (During boot) = Sits at the AOMEI loading screen, does absolutely nothing


I don't get it, it worked great the first time I did it, now it's just sitting at the AOMEI loading screen.

If they fixed that one issue, I would seriously use just this, but it looks like it's back to Macrium Reflect *Sigh*

 

I am not sure if it is a windows 8 issue or related to AOMEI. After restore I see drive c missing in system restore and I also see the real drive c: After I enable system restore in real drive c: the missing folder c is gone. See here:

 

Just for info.

I have just been trying out this program on my data partition.

It created the image ok. I then tried restoring live in Windows 7/64. It started ok after I closed the programs it requested. I had Opera running in the background. At 20% complete I tried to use Opera and the whole machine froze. Had to do a hard boot to get going again. I expected disaster but on running the program it ran the restore again and completed without problem.

 

Re: AOMEI Data Backuper 1.1

A warning about AOMEI Data Backupper if you have Windows 8 64-bit and GPT:

While the AOMEI web page says Backupper supports GPT, it does not.
If you install it on Win8 64-bit and click on System Backup,
it will tell you it does not support GPT and says it’s coming in the next version.

But what is worse is that if you click on Partition Backup instead of System Backup,
it doesn’t warn you that it doesn’t work with GPT.
So if you back up your system with Partition Backup and then try to restore it,
your system will not boot, and you will have to recover by something that does work;
luckily I had backed it up with Reflect and was able to restore that.

 

I don't have GPT but still am not that confident with it - thanks for the warning though.

 

I had mixed results with this program, while it works flawless to create backups, the linux based bootable rescue iso simply wont work, at least from usb, ended emailing them asking for help and some tech guy linked to a winpe based rescue iso, which worked flawless, for now, its a keeper for me.

 

Hi OldMX

Glad to hear you are happy with Aomei DB. If you are running Win7 and have the Winre.wim file on your system, the application can make its own PE style rescue disc. When I tried it, if I remember correctly, it gave me only an option to create the PE style rescue media, it had no option to create the Linux version, but I think that had to do with what I downloaded. You can download a version that has the Linux rescue inlcuded, or one without it. I chose just the application, and for the rescue media, it used the Winre.wim file within the C:\Recovery folder.

Worked quite well for me, and I thought the boot PE disc had some useful features also. I still use mainly IFL but Aomei DB certainly appears capable, although some have had some issues with it. I hope they continue to develop it.

Have a good day

Jim

 

Version 1.1.1 has been released. It now asks to download WAIK I had windows ADK. But it didn't recognize it. Going back to Macrium as its rescue media supports windows ADK and UEFI.

 

Hi

I downloaded the version v1.1.1 from Aomei Website Local Link 14mb for Win 7 only.

When installed it only shows v1.1 YET IT WAS THE CORRECT DOWNLOAD, moreover it does NOT ask to download WAIK it still creates the WinPE recovery environment from system files.

Terry

 

I tried the latest version in my laptop which came pre installed with windows 8. It asked to download and install WAIK. I am not sure what is causing this issue. May be I will try again later

 

Hi SM1

I raised the issue of the version 1.1 Shown on the software versus what it it is claimed to be ie v1.1.1 with the developer his reply was:

Hello,

Thanks for your email.
1) Is the 1.1 version that I downloaded correct if not where can I get the correct version from?
The download from our site are all V1.1.1 version, but it seems our programmers has not change the version signature when they package the installation file.
2) Have you changed the method of creating a WinPE Recovery CD?
We have not change the method, but if you want to directly burn the Recovery CD based on WinPE, your computer must has an unit which called winre.win in "C:/Recovery". If you can not directly create WinPE recovery CD, you can directly create Linux Recovery CD. Or install WAIK and then recreate WinPE recovery CD.
If you have any other questions please feel free to contact us.

SM1

In my view if you have WinRe.wim installed on your system in say C.Recovery or something similar (say Windows/System32/Recovery) then you will be able to create a recovery |CD/USB as per the software. It is when WinRe.wim is missing from your system that you have to download WAIK. There are other threads on this same issue.

I can assure you that on my Windows 7 system, (With a recovery WinRe.wim in place) it is a piece of cake to produce a Recovery CD/USB.

Terry

 

I've been testing out this program for several months and actually found this forum and thread by googling references to it. So here goes my experience with it so far:

I was looking for a replacement for Partition Magic and Drive Image 2002 which I used for years but neither program works with newer hardware. I got Aomei Partition Assistant Pro from GAOTD and really liked it and then downloaded Data Backupper. I like the simplicity and ease of use both programs. Partition Assistant is very good and I've had no issues with it but Data Backupper is still a bit rough around the edges. That being said, after a few months, I know the rougher edges and can work around them. One is that there is no disk checking and if you get images that fail an image check, it means there are problems with the disk and it's time to run chkdsk and do a bad sector test. I had it on one machine that had disk errors on both the partition I was imaging and the partition I was saving images to and I continually got bad images until I checked and fixed the disk errors. The other thing I've found is that images of active XP partitions with "ntldr" boot sectors won't be bootable when restored if saved with smart sector copying or cloning and Xp images have to be saved and cloned sector by sector. The opposite holds for Vista and newer systems that use "bootmgr". A sector by sector image will not be bootable and will require a recovery CD to fix it when restored but a smart sector image will boot fine when restored.

I've just upgraded to version 1.1.1. The name has been changed from Data Backupper to simply Backupper. It will make a WinPE disk from a normal Windows 7 installation. I'm hoping that there are some bug fixes. It has no problems with images made from version 1.1. I took the trouble to download Windows AIK to make a WinPE cd for Partition Assistant and ended up spending an evening with the AIK command line and help files and made a bootable WinPE partition on a 500gb hard disk in a second hard disk tray and copied both the Backupper and Partition Assistant WinPe programs onto it and then made the rest of the disk a data partition for the images. I set the bios of my Thinkpads to boot from it if inserted and it is working nicely. I can start the programs from a .cmd file and Backupper in a writable WinPE partition works just like in Windows and keeps a catalog of the images on the disk. Much more convenient than working from a CD.

I'm hoping for further improvements in this program. It is light and unobtrusive and has no ads or other annoyances that often come with free software. I can also recommend Partition Assistant highly. Version 5.2 is less than a 5mb download and covers just about all the bases. I've used it to convert a GPT disk to MBR, I've cloned disks and partitions with it and I've fixed some really troublesome partition table errors with it. I recently upgraded the hard drive on two laptops. One multiboots XP and Windows 7, the other one Xp and Vista. I did the Xp cloning sector by sector with Partition assistant and the Vista and 7 cloning with Backupper. The process went flawlessly and I'm writing this on the Windows 7 laptop.

 

Thanks for taking your time to contact the developers

I don't have the file WinRe.wim in either of the locations. There is a Recovery folder in System32 but no WinRe.wim file is there. I should add that I successfully created a recovery media using the earlier version in my desktop pc running windows 8 pro. I removed windows 8 pro and transferred the license to my laptop. My laptop OS is windows 8 which I have upgraded it to pro using the add features option. But now I think I should have used the windows 8 pro iso file for upgrade.

 

Found this app last night after failed acronis and had done a format and reinstall.

Got done a reformat, install and got everything up again then installed this app but hadn't tested it.

Thou I did a backup on a lark, never expecting to have to use it so soon.

I had forgot to install Image burn so did that and you guessed it forgot about the optional crap it loads up toolbars etc

Had that crap so decided to run the 1 backup of AOMEI 1.1 I had made previous and guess what it worked !!!
I use Intel SSD
Edit: using Win7 64bit
was very pleased.
I don't know about the bootable DVD never used it
So thanks to Aomei

 

I've been using it for a while now. I've done several backups, restores and clonings since my last post on Aomei Backupper. A couple of burps but nothing went seriously wrong. Cloning Windows 7 or Vista to a bigger drive has required me to repair the boot process with a repair disk. Restoring them to the same drive has worked flawlessly. Xp and earlier OSes require a sector by sector copy and restore. Now that I've figured that out, no real problems.

 

Are you using Windows 8?

 

No, I have 3 laptops I'm using Backupper on. Two dual boot Xp and Vista and one Windows 7 and Xp. I haven't tried it on a GPT partitioned disk. I have used the Aomei Partition Assistant to convert a GPT disk to MBR. I'm also doing cold backups. I image Xp from Vista or 7 and Vista and 7 are imaged from Xp. I did do a few hot images as tests and they worked but I prefer cold imaging which the dual booting makes easy and fast.

 

Does AOMEI backupper modify the boot secter/MBR at all?

 

I don't think it modifies the MBR in any way.. You can rebuild the MBR with Partition Assistant which I've done a couple of time to make a partition bootable. I haven't done a complete disk backup so I don't know if it saves the MBR in a complete disk backup. It doesn't have a separate MBR backup like the Paragon backup program and it doesn't change the MBR with partition backups and restores. That is why I've had to do MBR rebuilds with Partition assistant, mainly after cloning to a bigger disk with a different MBR.

It is a pretty simple and straight forward imaging program which is why I like it. Some imaging programs will modify OS files, partition structures and the MBR and make assumptions in how they do it that don't always hold--especially in multi boot systems. The way I work, the partitioning software and imaging software go hand in hand and I often have to tweak things with a partitioning program after a clone. Once the partition scheme is set up and working, the imaging is simple and painless.

 

Thought I'd give AB a test run with a backup and system restore. It seems obvious that this program is still in its infancy and there's lots of room for improvement. Having said that, it seems to be reliable when it comes to restoring a system image. I did read a bit of news somewhere that Aomei plans to release a paid version, which will include automated/scheduled backups as a feature. It suits me fine that this program does not do scheduled backups, as I only power-on my external backup drive when I need to run a backup.

Likes:
- Its a small Package in comparison to alternative backup apps (about 48MB).
- Lots of features for something that comes in a small package and is freeware (such as cloning, mounting for selective file restore, etc).
- Easily created a WinPE recovery CD and I don't even have WAIK installed.
- Its fairly quick to create a full backup image.
- Unlike many other backup apps (such as EaseUS Todo), AB is actually light on resources. I like the fact that AB has no background processes running. Not everyone needs background processes running all the time if they only need to use the app for occasional/manual backups.

Dislikes & Quirks:
- Being able to provide comments as a reference to your backups is great, but this is only possible for full disk images. Its not possible for differential or incremental images.
- Backup Management provides a list view of your images, but it only shows full images and does not provide a view of differential or incremental images. You'd need to click on properties for a full image, which takes another step to view associated differential or incremental images. This is a quirk.
- You can only delete full images from Backup Management, but you cannot delete differential or incremental images. You'd have to do this manually in windows explorer
- As mentioned by SM1, once AB had restored my system, I noticed windows system restore was turned off. I also noticed it was referencing the same empty C Folder, as provided by SM1's screen print. I had to turn off restore for the empty C folder and turn it on again for the C Drive. The empty C folder then disappeared, so everything was OK. Weird !!
- The biggest drawback by far - it is painstakingly slow to restore a system image. At times, I was wondering if AB restore was actually working at all. You need a great level patience when restoring a system image with this program. AB would have easily broken all records for the amount of time it takes to restore a system image on my PC. It seems to take 4 to 5 times as long in comparison to Paragon, Clonezilla and even W7 Backup and Restore. The AB pre-OS recovery environment takes an eternity to get up and running.

Hopefully someone from Aomei reviews these posts. Its a great way to receive feedback, which will help them improve their product. I've uninstalled AB for now, but will keep an eye out and look forward to testing an improved version in future.

 

tried this and ehh. its okay not much more for me. and imo it looks so much like a version easeus with maybe different skin. in fact i even had the exact same issues as i did with easeus.. messed up the whole drive partition after recovery.

 

It isn't slow on restoring for me. I'm restoring either off of an image on the same drive or on a second internal drive. I'm not using a USB drive. A 32gb partition takes around 10 minutes or so. I just did a couple of restores of a Windows 7 partition after testing software on it. It was smooth and fast and much faster than the Windows Image program that comes with Windows 7.

It doesn't feel or look like the Easus program to me. I've use both but I find the Aomei program simpler and easier to use and it isn't pushy in a commercial sense the way the free Easus software is.

 

Well, I just got this for XP, and wonder what this means...

free trial of Backupper Standard. This trial is full featured edition of Backupper Standard limited only for 30 days usage.

I had heard it was free. Also, does it compress the full image? Macrium will create a recovery disk even in XP, will this?