Aomei Backupper Standard 6
A competent backup package, but it’s not quite versatile or friendly enough to recommend
SCORE
PRICE Free from ubackup.com
Most free backup systems have limited features, and that’s certainly the case with Aomei Backupper, an unapologetically cu tdown counterpart to the publisher’s $47 Backupper Professional package.
Even so, there’s enough in the free package to warrant consideration. It supports multiple backup jobs with configurable compression, and email notifications to let you know if a scheduled job has gone wrong. You can set up incremental backups, although differentials are reserved for paying customers. And, as well as files and folders, you can back up individual partitions, Windows systems and complete hard disks.
Those core features are complemented by a foldersynchronisation feature, but if you’re looking for a Dropbox alternative you’ll be disappointed. Not only does the free edition of Aomei Backupper not support continuous syncing – instead, updates have to be either scheduled or manually triggered – but it also lacks any cloud component, and only works across local folders and network shares.
Nonetheless, as an everyday backup option, Aomei serves its purpose. Your backup jobs can each protect multiple folders, and can be scheduled to run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Its results in our tests were mediocre but not terrible: we waited 38 seconds for our 2GB folder to be backed up to an external drive. The standard compression is rather disappointing, though, reducing our archive only to 1.99GB.
Getting your files back is a tiny bit fiddly too. Restoring a backup in its entirety just takes a few clicks, but archives are stored in the proprietary AFI format, so if you want to pluck out individual files you have to navigate a fiddly tree interface inside the main Backupper window.
Needless to say, there’s no way to preview backed-up files, nor to browse through old versions.
Aside from that, the program serves largely as an advert for the commercial edition. Various features such as backup encryption, real-time syncing and system cloning are shown in the interface, but tagged with a little “Pro” icon. Frustratingly, the indicator also pops up when you try to configure a backup job to run at startup or when a USB device is connected – and you’ll meet the same obstacle if you attempt to create a backup chain of incremental and differential backups.
We can’t really criticise Aomei for all of this, but it makes Backupper Standard hard to like – especially when Paragon’s equally free offering gives you so much more.