MiniTool ShadowMaker Free 3.5
A viable backup option, but the free feature set is limited – and the full version isn’t worth the upgrade fee
SCORE
PRICE Free from minitool.com
With its svelte black design, the free ShadowMaker backup client looks like it fell out of the 1980s. At heart, though, it’s an unpretentious little program, whose strength is simplicity rather than glamour.
That’s not to say it’s minimal. Disk and partition images can be created as well as regular file backups – and while these are stored in MiniTool’s own MPI format, you can mount them from within the program for easy browsing and drag-and-drop file restoration in Explorer. You can also prepare for the day when you need to restore your entire system by creating a bootable USB flash drive containing the ShadowMaker software or installing the recovery environment directly onto your hard disk, with a boot menu for easy access.
ShadowMaker also includes a disk-to-disk cloning tool, and a straightforward sync feature that you can use to maintain one alwayscurrent duplicate of a specified folder – or indeed a set of folders. It doesn’t run continuously, but you can schedule it to check and update files as often as every hour.
File backups, meanwhile, can be defined with just a few clicks, and benefit from a good few mod cons. You can include multiple folders in each job, choose to apply moderate or maximum compression, enable email notifications to flag up any errors and set schedules on a scale from minutes to months.
A few features are notable by their absence, however. In particular, this free tool can’t create incremental or differential backups: the option is there, but if you try to enable it, an advert pops up urging you to upgrade to the Pro edition. The same happens if you click the “On event” option in the scheduler view.
And to be clear, it’s not that we’re necessarily opposed to paying for a good-quality backup solution. In this case, though, ShadowMaker Pro edition rules itself out of contention with a shocking $79 price tag (around £61). Alternatively, you can pay $36 per year for a two-PC licence, but we see no reason why a program like this, which lacks any sort of back-end component, should be rented rather than purchased.
We can’t say that ShadowMaker is especially speedy, either: it took 53 seconds to back up our test folder, while Cobian managed it in 18. All in all, MiniTool’s free backup offering does a fair job, but it is – if you’ll pardon the expression – overshadowed by the speed and comprehensiveness of other contenders.