Solved AOMEI Backupper (Free Standard Edition) Review

Dch48 · Jan 18, 2022

cereberus said:
It works fine on my emmc laptop - in what way is V7 better?

To be honest, I don't remember but V8 caused some problem that went away when I returned to 7. Another thing I will say about Macrium is this. When making the boot drive, the default RE environment did not work. The USB stick would not boot. I had to choose the Win 10 PE environment which had to be downloaded. That worked perfectly.

ish4d0w · Jan 20, 2022

Dch48 said:
the default RE environment did not work. The USB stick would not boot.

Generally I don't trust that RE environment that Macrium can create using the existing Windows installation

Dch48 said:
I had to choose the Win 10 PE environment which had to be downloaded. That worked perfectly.

This is what I recommend. WADK - Windows PE 10.0 is very reliable and if you have the option to use a clean, factory-built untouched WIM file (which is what Macrium is doing when you select this option), should be considered the better choice here.

The same goes for AOMEI, but AOMEI is defaulting to this option so no need to change anything.

I like both AOMEI and Macrium. I am more towards AOMEI but let me just say that AOMEI's free version is much more restrictive than Macrium's free version. For instance, AOMEI Free Backupper cannot do clones, while Macrium Free can. This is a game changer, unless you are willing to pay.
If you pay, AOMEI is just as great as Macrium, and its interface is more user friendly in my opinion, and seems to have better compression too.

Archigos · Jan 20, 2022

I started reading this thread near the beginning and decided to look into both these programs as I needed something for backups on my new system. My original plan was to download both free versions, make a full backup and test them, but when I went to AOMEI first, I installed Backupper and forgot to check the other app. So far, I'm happy with AOMEI (free) since I had a small 'issue' when testing the backup created. I contacted support and explained it, they responded quickly and solved the issue (it was my NAS rebooted while the check was happening, but the backup itself was fine). I'm thinking of upgrading to the paid version soon. :)

pietcorus2 · Jan 20, 2022

Using them both ( AoMei and Macrium ) , if one fails , the other will safe me !
They are both very good backuppers .........but you just have to be sure , costed me too much time to install Windows , software, etc
Every 5 days these two friends backup my complete OS , backups goes to external HDDs .
Only hardware failure can make a problem , but this wont happen easy............

John · Jan 20, 2022

I know this forum is Free Aomei, but it doesn't have all the features I'm spoiled with using Macrium Reflect Home, so I found a half-price Aomei Pro and am using it as a twice per week backup and Macrium as my daily backup. That way I am hopefully protected pretty well. Rather foolish, I admit, but not if I need the extra backups. I'm a pessimist when it comes to computers, I guess.

pietcorus2 · Jan 21, 2022

Security and safety has its price ..............time !

cereberus · Jan 21, 2022

John said:
I know this forum is Free Aomei, but it doesn't have all the features I'm spoiled with using Macrium Reflect Home, so I found a half-price Aomei Pro and am using it as a twice per week backup and Macrium as my daily backup. That way I am hopefully protected pretty well. Rather foolish, I admit, but not if I need the extra backups. I'm a pessimist when it comes to computers, I guess.

Paranoia is healthy when it comes to backups.

cereberus · Jan 21, 2022

pietcorus2 said:
Security and safety has its price ..............time !

Depends how you look at. Each backup takes me about 3 minutes, and I can recover in 15 minutes from a complete mess.

If I had to reinstall from scratch, and get seeting back to my pteferences etc, that would take me 10-20 hours at least i.e. 200-400 times as long.

Of course, if you never have to do a restore, eventually backup time will surpass recovery time. If one uses automatic scheduling when pc is not in use, you can claim backups take zero realtime

Dch48 · Jan 21, 2022

The drives I backup have about 500GB on them. This computer has 567. They contain Windows and everything else that is installed. My system backups with AOMEI take a good 40 minutes backing up from the SSD to an internal HDD which is the way that goes the fastest for me. The external HDD's take a lot longer. I could replace the internal drive with another SSD but to me that would be a waste of money. I never schedule the backups and don't do them as often as I probably should. Many times months go by in between them. I never do incremental ones either. It's all or nothing.:)

ish4d0w · Jan 22, 2022

Dch48 said:
The drives I backup have about 500GB on them. This computer has 567. They contain Windows and everything else that is installed. My system backups with AOMEI take a good 40 minutes backing up from the SSD to an internal HDD which is the way that goes the fastest for me. The external HDD's take a lot longer. I could replace the internal drive with another SSD but to me that would be a waste of money. I never schedule the backups and don't do them as often as I probably should. Many times months go by in between them. I never do incremental ones either. It's all or nothing.:)

You could try Acronis True Image's NonStop Backup feature, if you have two internal drives, it sounds like just what you're looking for.

While Acronis is paid, they offer a free version if you have a Western Digital drive. (external, internal, or even an SSD, they are all approved)

Of course, it is still wise to create backups to external drives too, because like, what if you lose your computer itself? Then both internal drives would be gone.

Dch48 · Jan 22, 2022

ish4d0w said:
You could try Acronis True Image's NonStop Backup feature, if you have two internal drives, it sounds like just what you're looking for.

While Acronis is paid, they offer a free version if you have a Western Digital drive. (external, internal, or even an SSD, they are all approved)

Of course, it is still wise to create backups to external drives too, because like, what if you lose your computer itself? Then both internal drives would be gone.

What do you mean by lose? Anyway, the backups to the internal Seagate Barracuda go at up to 200mb/sec. It usually settles at about 175. My faster external drive starts at 130 and goes down to below 100. The other one only hits a max of 67. My fastest Flash drives hit max write speeds of 45 and that's it. I don't have any WD drives and I don't want automatic backups going on.

Wynona · Jan 22, 2022

Dch48 said:
The drives I backup have about 500GB on them. This computer has 567. They contain Windows and everything else that is installed. My system backups with AOMEI take a good 40 minutes backing up from the SSD to an internal HDD which is the way that goes the fastest for me. The external HDD's take a lot longer. I could replace the internal drive with another SSD but to me that would be a waste of money. I never schedule the backups and don't do them as often as I probably should. Many times months go by in between them. I never do incremental ones either. It's all or nothing.:)

I am testing Aomei for my students because it seems to have the shortest learning curve. I still don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I am pretty sure you can schedule automatic backups.

Failing Aomei being able to schedule backups, there's always Macrium Reflect that I know can be scheduled to back up your system, including (if you have one) a dual boot system such as Windows 10 and Windows 11. It also has Image Guard which will protect your backups.

Wynona · Jan 22, 2022

Dch48 said:
What do you mean by lose? Anyway, the backups to the internal Seagate Barracuda go at up to 200mb/sec. It usually settles at about 175. My faster external drive starts at 130 and goes down to below 100. The other one only hits a max of 67. My fastest Flash drives hit max write speeds of 45 and that's it. I don't have any WD drives and I don't want automatic backups going on.

I think he means some hairy armed jerk climbing in your window to take your stuff . . .

OK, disregard my other post since you don't want automatic backups.

John · Jan 23, 2022

ish4d0w said:
......Of course, it is still wise to create backups to external drives too, because like, what if you lose your computer itself? Then both internal drives would be gone.

John · Jan 23, 2022

That's a little too much for me - doesn't it mean you need a 2nd back up drive? I do well to keep the first one. I would think chances are low that you might lose your pc and your backup drive at the same time.

ish4d0w · Jan 23, 2022

Yes, that's what I meant. If it is a notebook computer you have, then it might as well be lost and then your only data backup would be gone.
Or if it was a desktop computer, a power surge/power supply failure could easily render both internal drives unusable.

For these two reasons, it is wise to backup to an external disk I think.

Wynona · Jan 23, 2022

ish4d0w said:
Yes, that's what I meant. If it is a notebook computer you have, then it might as well be lost and then your only data backup would be gone.
Or if it was a desktop computer, a power surge/power supply failure could easily render both internal drives unusable.

For these two reasons, it is wise to backup to an external disk I think.

Backing up to an external drive is, in my not very humble opinion, is a smart thing to do. But even smarter, is to disconnect that external drive so that if what you describe above happens, it's not toast too. Reconnecting it for backups is inconvenient, but should pay off in the long run.

Dch48 · Jan 23, 2022

ish4d0w said:
Yes, that's what I meant. If it is a notebook computer you have, then it might as well be lost and then your only data backup would be gone.
Or if it was a desktop computer, a power surge/power supply failure could easily render both internal drives unusable.

For these two reasons, it is wise to backup to an external disk I think.

But in that case you wouldn't be able to use a backup from any drive, internal or external. Not without a working power supply. Even in a notebook, the drives could be removed. Personally I have never seen a power supply failure that destroyed everything. The worst thing I have seen is when the mobo in my niece's machine developed a short. That's one machine in 23 years. I'll go with those odds.

I also have yet to see a HDD fail. I'll stick with my internal drives and their 50% faster backup times vs my externals. Maybe it's just me, but for long term data storage, I still prefer a HDD over a SSD. SSD's can be easily destroyed by just a static charge.

John · Jan 23, 2022

OK now I am getting a little confused Do you backup to your internal disk and your external disk at the same time? If so how is that done? Or, do you backup to internal on certain times and external other times? I currently only backup to my external disk (WD Passport) daily with Macrium and weekly with Aomei. Should I be backing up to my internal disk also?

Wynona · Jan 23, 2022

John said:
OK now I am getting a little confused Do you backup to your internal disk and your external disk at the same time? If so how is that done? Or, do you backup to internal on certain times and external other times? I currently only backup to my external disk (WD Passport) daily with Macrium and weekly with Aomei. Should I be backing up to my internal disk also?

@John, I backup to an external hard drive only. Early on, back in the dark ages of computers, we were told not to depend on an internal hard drive for backups. I don't see that happening in today's computer world, but I'm still ambivalent about using an internal drive.

My reasoning being, 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.

So, if things should get that drastic, I can use my external hard drive to "restore" to a newer computer.

She wanders around looking for her tin hat . . . "Now where did I put that thing?"

Solved AOMEI Backupper (Free Standard Edition) Review

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