Hi Anyone knows about a good reliable backup program one can recommend to people, now when Macrium are going to discontinue their free version the one stable, for me, recommendation is gone. Aomei is to unreliable and failes to often, EaseUS is a bit better but still not safe to use, so, what others, free simple and reliable backup software are there that one can recommend from now on?
I don't believe there are any free ones, other than what was already mentioned. With that said, you cannot go wrong with Terabyte's Image for Windows. It's the best there is, and it's pretty cheap.
Active@ Disk Image Lite Disk Image freeware. Windows & Servers Backup Software. Win XP, 7, 2003, 2008, 8, 8.1, 10 (disk-image.com)
I used to use Paragon products for years for my backups and partition management. I can't recall ever having problems with it.
I liked DS. But the only reason I cannot recommend it is because it creates a different .sna for every partition it backs up. Now day, with eufi partitions and reserved partitions, users can have multiple required partitions to boot. I'd rather have one image file, not many.
Same here. Paragon was the cream of the crop years ago. Might still be but i moved on to other products anymore. Can't recall a single failure with them either.
I see the free version doesn't support cloning. Does it allow you to make a recoverable bootable drive for those times when you can't even boot to the OS and want to perform a restoration?
It is not free, you have to buy their Hard disk manager to get the program. So it is included, for free, in it.
The truth is, despite all these names being mentioned, there really are only a few titles that are accepted as reliable. DriveSnapshot, IFW, Backupper and Reflect. Just because someone make an imaging program doesn't mean they make a reliable imaging program.
True. Active@ Disk Image and Paragon, though, are as reliable as you can get for a disk imaging program, as I've been using them for years, along with Acronis, R-Drive Image and Terabyte IFW.
Used it a few times, but I don't like the way it creates multiple image files for a single OS disk. Too messy for my taste lol.
@oliverjia - I know it's a pain but you can in the DS program go to Advanced Options -> Maximum image single size file and add a bunch of zeros on that default setting and you will get the Disk backup without multiple files. Also i always unchech .hsh radio box too since it's for Differentials.
No. I think what @oliverjia and @n8chavez are talking about, is DS creating three separate files (HD1-1.sna, HD1-2.sna and BackupName.sna) when creating an image on a GPT disk, where there are an EFI, MSR and Windows partitions. Yes it's a downside.
Paragon free and Active disc image looks interesting. Active more than Paragon since it looks simpler. Unfortunately none of them has a boot menu option. So thoose 2 one can recommend to novice individuals. DS is out of the question since it is paid and is nothing but simple for novice users. Same goes for IFW that someone recommended. Active disc image was incredible fast when doing a backup. IFW does my system in 19sec, Active did it in 9. Wow. So it is a pity it does not have a boot menu. Messing with usb every time one has to restore is slow and unpractical . But i am going to test it to see if it also is fast with the actual restore.
Just yesterday here was presented a program called "Hasleo Backup Suite Free": https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/hasleo-backup-suite.449122/ I had never heard of it but perhaps it is also an interesting alternative. Their website: https://www.easyuefi.com/backup-software/backup-suite-free.html
Fwiw, I installed and started using Hasleo Backup Free as soon as @mood introduced it to this forum. I have also been a Macrium Reflect Free user ever since v7. Hasleo-Free actually offers more backup features than MR-Free (such as incremental backups) and some useful tools. As with MR-Free it can build a rescue boot disk and a rescue boot menu, but it's not quite as smart as MR for injecting all necessary drivers for your system (it asks you to manually identify any drivers so it can inject them into the boot media). However, my Hasleo boot media worked quite well. Hasleo also supports backup scheduling, but I haven't tried that yet. I find Hasleo's user interface to be very user-friendly and its backups to be reliable (however that's based on just 2 backup-restore operations so far).
