SHOULD I PAY FOR…?
Choose the right version of software
AOMEI Backupper Professional www.snipca.com/43984 Price: $39.95 (£35) per year Free trial period: 30 days What you need: Windows 7, 8.1, 10 or 11
AOMEI Backupper is one of the simplest and most reliable backup programs, but the differences between its free Standard edition and paid-for Professional version may make it difficult to decide which one’s best for you.
AOMEI Backupper Standard lets you back up your main system drive, other hard drives, disk partitions and specific folders to a variety of devices, including external hard drives, NAS drives and USB sticks. You can schedule backups to take place at a time and frequency that suits you, and choose between a Full backup, which backs up everything, and an Incremental one.
Those options should be enough for most people, but Backupper Professional offers some tempting extra features. These include backing up to a CD or DVD, encrypted backups to protect your private files, ‘differential’ backups, which target only files that have changed since the last full backup, and both real-time and two-way syncs. It also lets you clone your entire system to an SSD or hard drive, whereas the free version can only clone specific drives and partitions.
However, other options in the paid-for version are aimed more at advanced users than home users performing the occasional backup, for example backing up from the command line, cloning a ‘dynamic disk’ (enhanced partition table) and merging backup images. These features don’t clutter the program’s interface – the two versions are identical – but you’re unlikely to need them.
We were also disappointed that AOMEI Backupper’s new Cloud Backup feature (see screenshot), which gives you 1TB of secure online storage, is limited to a 15-day trial in both editions – though you can add it to Professional for an extra £20 a year. Once that trial expires, all your files will be deleted, which isn’t much of a backup.
OUR VERDICT: Don’t pay for it
If you don’t mind some options being locked behind Pro labels and occasional nags to upgrade, AOMEI Backupper Standard will be sufficient for your backup needs. The Pro version is more versatile, especially for syncing files, but why pay £35 a year for features you’ll never or rarely use?