Design and features
BEST FREE BACKUP SOFTWARE: AOMEI BACKUPPER STANDARD 4
Would you rather pay $50 for your backup software, or get it for free? All things being equal, and with the free Aomei Backupper Standard ( go.pcworld.com/bst4) they pretty much are, we’re generally going to opt for the latter. Backupper even sports real-time sync, mirroring files to an external folder whenever changes occur. Backupper Standard’s bitmapped interface may be retro, but the layout and workflow are so intuitive, even beginners should have few problems figuring out what to do. At least you have some idea of backup concepts involved.
We spotted a couple of mild interface glitches in Aomei Backupper. When you increase the size of Windows objects in the Display Preferences (to 125% in this case), Backupper’s window actually shrinks. There are other tiny scaling glitches, such as the bottom of a dialog cut off, but nothing that renders the program unusable. Hopefully this will be addressed soon with a new look and a rendered (drawn in real time), not static bitmapped GUI.
Despite being free, there’s little missing from Backupper Standard’s feature set, which includes: imaging, file backup, disk cloning, and plain file syncing. There are a plethora of scheduling options as well as syncing, including the aforementioned real-time synchronization. Syncing isn’t true back up—it’s keeping a mirror of your data in another location—a great hedge against losing recent work.
Backupper will image entire drives or partitions, verify them, and mount them so you can grab a few files from one. The pay version adds imaging of dynamic volumes, and merging images—tasks few end users will ever need to perform. The system cloning offered in the $40 paid version ($50 if you opt for lifetime free upgrades) could be very useful, as could the network boot function. But that’s speaking from an IT perspective.
Aomei provides both Linux and Windows PE boot images, which can be burned to CD or installed on USB drives.