You may have seen my review on Carbonite online backup service a few weeks back, an online computer backup service, which I liked quite a lot, mainly because it didn’t intrude on my workflow as much as most backup applications. EASEUS Todo Backup faces some tough competition from a lot of similar utilities on the market, but it has one big advantage — it’s free!
The installation is very quick and easy and when you start the backup tool for the first time, you’re presented with a simple, easy to use menu. The main screen highlights the backup, restore and clone disk options, with the backup process being extremely straightforward — using Todo Backup for the first time reminded me of using Windows XP for the first time after using Windows 2000 with the new “bubblegum” interface, with everything nicely laid out and visible.
Backup Up Your Data
When you want to back up your drive, you have the choice of archiving the data or creating the image sector by sector. When you decide, choose the location where you want to store the backup! When you’ve got the formalities out of the way, you can go on to prioritise the backup — a feature I found most useful when I’m on my computer all day doing various things, some of which are rather CPU intensive. You can choose whether the backup is a low, normal or high priority to make sure that you have enough juice left to do the things you need to, although if you’re just web browsing and sending e-mail, you shouldn’t have to worry too much about this.
On the same window, you can then choose whether or not you want to compress and encrypt the backup image. The image has three compression settings, set at either normal, high or maximum — bear in mind that the higher level of compression you set the longer the backup will take, so think before you choose! If you can only backup to limited media, DVD for example, you can split the image into certain sized segments. I thought this was a great addition for those who don’t have external or secondary drives for their system.
Restoring Your Data From A Backup
So that’s backing up done, but what happens when your hard drive packs in and you need all that data back from where it came? I was actually surprised at the simplicity of the whole thing; it was a case of simply locating the backup file and telling the program where to put your stuff! As long as the destination drive has enough capacity for the image, you’re good to go. One very handy feature I found here was the automatic hiding of all the drives that aren’t big enough to handle the image which helps avoid possible confusion, although if the only drive in your machine wasn’t big enough to handle the image it may actually cause some confusion. As well as the backup/restore functions, the clone disk option is nice if you want to copy data from one drive directly to another. I found this to work great with either 2 internal drives as well as an external drive too.
In Summary
If you’re an advanced user that needs more than what this is offering, you’ll most probably have to pay for what you’re looking for — the only minor negative I can find in the application is the fact that I had to restart my PC after installing the program; it’s the 21st century, do we really need to restart our computers after installing a piece of software?
For a free piece of software, Todo Backup is an absolutely fantastic and easy to use backup solution that I’d recommend to anyone looking to back up their data. It has all of the features that the average user needs to back up, and presents it in an easy to see and easy to navigate way.
Hoping to study Computer Science at University in the near future, you’ll seldom see John without a computer in touching distance! His interests include building computers, reading all sorts of literature and of course writing for Zath to keep you updated on all the latest in the world of tech!