Minitool Shadowmaker Free 1.0
www.snipca.com/25679 What you need: Windows 7, 8/8.1 or 10
Shadowmaker is a brand new backup program from Minitool – makers of the excellent Partition Wizard Free Edition. It’s brilliantly easy to use and provides a complete set of tools for creating system images of your PC, restoring lost data, cloning drives, creating bootable rescue discs and more.
To get Shadowmaker Free, go to the URL above and click the ‘Have a Try’ button. Save the .exe file to your PC, then follow the prompts. There’s nothing nasty to watch out for during installation and no unwanted extras to untick.
Launch Shadowmaker Free and you’ll be greeted by a clean, simple interface. Tabs along the top provide access to its main functions – Backup, Restore and so on. You can create a quick backup in just a few clicks, but there are also some deceptively powerful options and features. In the main Backup section, for example, you can schedule your backups, compress them so they take up less space, or exclude certain system files. It’s also possible to encrypt your backup, so that only people with the password can access it. Click the Tools tab for a selection of very useful features, including the ability to clone a drive, and mount and browse a backup file, as if it were another drive, which is great for recovering files.
We recommend Shadowmaker Free, but it’s not perfect – yet. There are some features that aren’t ready to use in the final version. The ability to back up another PC remotely over a network is offered, for example, but clicking it only points you towards the Beta 3.0 version. This and other features, will be coming in future updates of Shadowmaker Free, but you can try out the Beta 3.0 version yourself by downloading it from www.snipca.com/25678. Be aware that beta versions are usually unstable and contain bugs.