Solved AOMEI Backupper (Free Standard Edition) Review

Thanks, Wynona - that solves my question. I will just continue with my external backup. I do have Macrium Image Guardian turned ON. (Macrium Image Guardian, a feature that prevents backup files from being encrypted by ransomware.)

Wynona said:

what if the the failure is so bad that the hardware (the whole computer) actually refuses to boot! That internal hard drive will be pretty useless to me at that point.

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Not necessarily. You could still boot into your recovery disk for the backup program and attempt to restore. Which is the same thing you'd have to do to use an external drive. If the computer won't do that and won't even turn on, you can still take the internal drive out. It wouldn't be any more useless than an external one in that situation.

I backup my 2 main computers, my gaming desktop and my gaming laptop, from their SSD main drive to an internal HDD. The other systems, none of which have more than one internal drive, get backed up to external HDD's. SATA to USB is slower than SATA to SATA.

Two of the Windows 10 machines are still using HDD's as their only storage. I converted 3 out of 5 to SSD.

Dch48 said:

Personally I have never seen a power supply failure that destroyed everything. ..
I also have yet to see a HDD fail.

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Consider yourself very lucky. I have seen many, and it's been only 10 years :)

Dch48 said:

I'll stick with my internal drives and their 50% faster backup times vs my externals.

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But why is it slower to back up to external drives? Don't you use USB 3 with a quality SATA<>USB bridge, such as those with these pre-built portable HDDs?

Dch48 said:

Maybe it's just me, but for long term data storage, I still prefer a HDD over a SSD.

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I agree. Much more reliable for that.

Dch48 said:

SSD's can be easily destroyed by just a static charge.

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Not only that: they 'age' and wear out with normal use. HDDs do not.


I generally prefer HDDs. I have lots of them. But for a system drive, I use SSD, just because Windows 10/11 is unacceptably slow if it runs on HDD, it is simply designed with SSDs in mind I guess

Dch48 said:

SATA to USB is slower than SATA to SATA.

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Yes. But there are some really good quality bridges out there. Specifically I'm thinking about WD's Elements and TOSHIBA Canvio series. You would hardly notice a difference. WD MyPassport is also nice. These are all USB 3.1 Portable Hard drives

ish4d0w said:

Not only that: they 'age' and wear out with normal use. HDDs do not.

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This is just not true - hdds age and wear with normal use as well - anything with moving parts age and wear in use.

Moderns SSDs have a similar life expectancy to HDDs.

cereberus said:

This is just not true - hdds age and wear with normal use as well - anything with moving parts age and wear in use.

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They "age" in a very different (mechanical) way and much slower in that sense. On the other hand, SSD is flash memory, which "ages" with each read/write operation and even has a target TBW (terrabytes written) counter, and if you exceed that, warranty is void... So tell me about how that is not much worse than HDDs, on which there is no such "timebomb".

cereberus said:

Moderns SSDs have a similar life expectancy to HDDs.

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I see, but I'd say that only applies to light usage. HDDs can, theoretically, handle more I/O as it isn't the amount of data read/written that ages them but their mechanical (moving) parts aging slowly.

again, very different games.

Let's be realistic here ...

Both SSD (and NVMe), Digital drives and conventional Mechanical Hard drives have a theoretical life expectancy, although the Digital drives when first available had a lifetime considerably less than that of the old mechanical drives, this gap is continually becoming less in reality

However in real life scenarios users will likely replace the drives they use at a time nowhere near the theoretical expected usable life. This is more likely to happen sooner when used in a managed data system in business than a small business . The general home and especially enthusiast user use will However tend to replace the drive due to an wish to use the latest, largest, fastest and reliable unit available. These users also replace their hardware generally more often than a business, and will often update the drives they use at this time .

I still personally prefer the use conventional Hard Drives for data storage, for purely cost reasons, though I will utilise an input buffer using Intel Optane M2 memory modules which can help with dumping data from Fast NVMe drives that I use for System drives and the SATA SSD I use for database management tasks and temporary storage for my image processing.

ish4d0w said:

HDDs can, theoretically, handle more I/O as it isn't the amount of data read/written that ages them but their mechanical (moving) parts aging slowly.

again, very different games.

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The wear on HDDs is the same for both reading and writing. The heads have to fly back and forth across the disk surface, their positional accuracy can can deteriorate with wear, and the disk surface can wear. SSDs on the other hand only age with writes, reading does no harm at all.

ish4d0w said:

They "age" in a very different (mechanical) way and much slower in that sense. On the other hand, SSD is flash memory, which "ages" with each read/write operation and even has a target TBW (terrabytes written) counter, and if you exceed that, warranty is void... So tell me about how that is not much worse than HDDs, on which there is no such "timebomb".

I see, but I'd say that only applies to light usage. HDDs can, theoretically, handle more I/O as it isn't the amount of data read/written that ages them but their mechanical (moving) parts aging slowly.

again, very different games.

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You are just living in the past - SSDs are much more durable now.

Those SSD warranties are worthless - they are just set so low to avoid the drive vendors ever having to make payouts. I have an SSD that is several times over its original warranty and still going strong.

Drives fail 3 ways:

1) gradually aging due to wear and tear, SSDs are much more durable and you can easily see aging. HDDS age with reading and writing, SSDs only age with writing.

2) catastrophic aging/failure (excluding 3 below)
HDDS will be much more prone to this as moving parts.
SSDs will not fail like this unless incredibly high writing rate sustained over a long period.

It is a simple fact of life, one of the biggest killers of drive is simply dropping pc (laptops particularly).
SSDs are far more resilient to being dropped (no moving parts)

3) failure of interface electronics
This can happen to either at any time


Either drive type can fail instantaneously if the interface electronics fails - odds of that are pretty much the same on both types.

Saying an HDD is more reliable than an SSD is meaningless without proper context. I have had several HDDs fail on me instantaneously but I have never had an SSD fail. As time goes on £/GB costs for SSDs reduce and I have replaced my low capacity SSDs with 1 TB SSDs.

Add a usb enclosure to the old lower capacity SSDs and you have a really fast and robust equivalent of a flash drive (albeit bulkier).

The only reason I would choose an HDD over an SSD nowadays is for BULK backup external storage, simply as £/GB costs are much lower. Even then, you need to take care you do not drop the drives.

Worrying about the life expectancy of an SSD is pointless these days. Make sure it is backed up and when its life is near the end, buy a new one with much more capacity than old one for same price.

Dch48 said:

Not necessarily. You could still boot into your recovery disk for the backup program and attempt to restore. Which is the same thing you'd have to do to use an external drive. If the computer won't do that and won't even turn on, you can still take the internal drive out. It wouldn't be any more useless than an external one in that situation.

I backup my 2 main computers, my gaming desktop and my gaming laptop, from their SSD main drive to an internal HDD. The other systems, none of which have more than one internal drive, get backed up to external HDD's. SATA to USB is slower than SATA to SATA.

Two of the Windows 10 machines are still using HDD's as their only storage. I converted 3 out of 5 to SSD.

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As I've been told multiple times . . . there's more than one way to skin a cat. Why anyone would want to do that, though, is beyond me.

Since I've never been put into that situation (never did the internal backup thing), I wasn't aware you could boot from an internal. And, not to be argumentative, I wouldn't expect your average home user to know that either.

And, now that I think of it, a TenForums friend helped me set up my backups so that Macrium is one of the "boot options".

And there too, your average home user probably wouldn't know how to do that.

ish4d0w said:

But why is it slower to back up to external drives? Don't you use USB 3 with a quality SATA<>USB bridge, such as those with these pre-built portable HDDs?

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ish4d0w said:

Yes. But there are some really good quality bridges out there. Specifically I'm thinking about WD's Elements and TOSHIBA Canvio series. You would hardly notice a difference. WD MyPassport is also nice. These are all USB 3.1 Portable Hard drives

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Believe me, it is much slower with the drives I have. My SSD to internal HDD backup transfers go at 175-200 MBps. Backing up to my USB 3.0 Toshiba Canvio drive goes at a max of 130 and slows down to below 100 pretty quickly. The other external is a Hitachi ex -laptop drive in a Sabrent 3.0 USB enclosure and it maxes out transfers at about 65-70 MBps. If I had external SSD's of course it would be much faster but I don't.

Like I said, in my 23 years of Windows usage, I have never seen a HDD fail. Not in my personal machines nor in those of any family members. The 80 gig one in my 2005 vintage HP laptop is still going strong and has been put through a lot. It was my only computer for 5 or 6 years and I did everything on it including playing all of my games. It's been rode hard and put away wet for most of it's life. It became my guinea pig machine to test out Windows 8, 8.1, and then 10. It has also run various flavors of Linux. Currently, it has a triple boot system of 98 Second Edition, XP Pro, and Windows 7 Home Premium. I have an even older IDE drive in an enclosure that still works as well.

I also disagree that Windows 10 is unacceptably slow on an HDD. Two of the machines here still have HDD's and boot up in less than 80 seconds and run just fine after that. That speed is more than acceptable to me.

Wynona said:

As I've been told multiple times . . . there's more than one way to skin a cat. Why anyone would want to do that, though, is beyond me. :)

Since I've never been put into that situation (never did the internal backup thing), I wasn't aware you could boot from an internal. And, not to be argumentative, I wouldn't expect your average home user to know that either.

And, now that I think of it, a TenForums friend helped me set up my backups so that Macrium is one of the "boot options".

And there too, your average home user probably wouldn't know how to do that.

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I didn't mean to boot from the internal drive. I meant booting from an optical disk or USB stick that has the rescue environment on it. And yes , Macrium will let you boot into the recovery environment directly from your main drive.

Dch48 said:

Like I said, in my 23 years of Windows usage, I have never seen a HDD fail.

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I have had three HDDs fail in the last five years....

Dch48 said:

Like I said, in my 23 years of Windows usage, I have never seen a HDD fail.

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Either:

1) hard drives rarely fail

or

2) you haved been lucky.


Which do you think it is?



The figure below is actually quite typical of modern equipment with moving parts.

1) the initial failure rate in 1st year or so (infant mortality) tends to be quite high - this is main due to manufacturing defects.

2) mid-life - rate plateaus at a low rate (young to middle age mortality)

3) end -life - failure rates sharply increase after several years (old age mortality)

The rates and extent may vary depending on quality e.g. you would expect a BMW to outlast a Ford.

However, the basic trends are always the same.

cereberus said:

Either:

1) hard drives rarely fail

or

2) you have been lucky.


Which do you think it is?

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Both actually. The only drive I have ever seen fail was an optical drive in my housemate's machine. Other than that, I have seen 2 power supply failures and one monitor, but that's it. Believe it or not, but when I had to return my MSI motherboard a few weeks ago, that was the first time I have ever had to return anything electronic due to defect or failure within the warranty period.

I guess I am a lucky guy. I have never had a serious problem from a Windows Update and have never had to roll one back. I also have never been actively infected by a virus or trojan. The only time I have had to reinstall Windows was when I listened to "expert" advice on how to change something and it totally borked the OS. I now just let things run the way they were designed to and only change settings that are provided in the OS itself. I also will always use a native Microsoft product to do things if it's free. The only thing I don't use is Office because it costs too much. I use the WPS suite from Kingsoft.

Dch48 said:

Both actually. The only drive I have ever seen fail was an optical drive in my housemate's machine. Other than that, I have seen 2 power supply failures and one monitor, but that's it. Believe it or not, but when I had to return my MSI motherboard a few weeks ago, that was the first time I have ever had to return anything electronic due to defect or failure within the warranty period.

I guess I am a lucky guy. I have never had a serious problem from a Windows Update and have never had to roll one back. I also have never been actively infected by a virus or trojan. The only time I have had to reinstall Windows was when I listened to "expert" advice on how to change something and it totally borked the OS. I now just let things run the way they were designed to and only change settings that are provided in the OS itself. I also will always use a native Microsoft product to do things if it's free. The only thing I don't use is Office because it costs too much. I use the WPS suite from Kingsoft.

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Ditto for me; hardly any failures.

I have seen a fair number of failures over the years, but the percentage is probably pretty low overall as I have worked with a lot of Hard drives over the years.

Back in the 1980s the failure rate was pretty high, but as all you had to do was move the case slightly whilst a Write action was in progress, this was to be expected

Reliability has , over the years, improved tremendously, due to improvements in the physical design of the hardware and user knowledge improving

barman58 said:

I have seen a fair number of failures over the years, but the percentage is probably pretty low overall as I have worked with a lot of Hard drives over the years.

Back in the 1980s the failure rate was pretty high, but as all you had to do was move the case slightly whilst a Write action was in progress, this was to be expected

Reliability has , over the years, improved tremendously, due to improvements in the physical design of the hardware and user knowledge improving

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The gravity of this situation is that dropping hard drives is probably the quickest way to kill a drive.

My experience with HDD's starts in 1999 with my DiamondMax Maxtor 8.5 GB drive in a Win 98 SE computer. I missed the years when the drive had to be parked before it could be moved at all. My next computer in 2005 had a 200GB drive which I believe was Western Digital. My first laptop in 2006 had an 80GB Fujitsu. Second laptop in 2011 had a 640GB Hitachi. This desktop which was originally purchased in 2014 came with a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. My Acer laptop purchased last year also had a 1TB Seagate in it. I have never bought a computer that came with an SSD in it. My first conversion was the 2011 laptop which got a 256GB Silicon Power A55 drive. Then I put the 1TB Samsung 860 QVO in this desktop and it originally ran at only SATA 2 speed because that was all the mobo had. I added a Crucial MX500 m.2 SATA 1TB SSD to the Acer shortly after getting it. I don't have any Nvme drives. Like I have said, never a drive failure in anything. I have never even had to replace a CMOS battery. Not even in the 2006 laptop which is still going strong.

If you want to increase lifetime of your HDDs ..............just dont defragment too much , the less defragmenting the better !

pietcorus2 said:

If you want to increase lifetime of your HDDs ..............just dont defragment too much , the less defragmenting the better !

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Is that true though? A defragmented HDD means less wear on the head positioning mechanism, as it doesn't have to thrash about to read all of a file. The trade-off may not be as clear-cut as you think.