Seeing that many of you mentioned about EaseUS ToDo Backup Free on the backup strategy that I used with Acronis True Image Home, I’ve decided to test it out. In fact I’ve written a review on EaseUS ToDo Backup Free when they were at their first version 2 years ago. Looking back at the graphical user interface of EaseUS ToDo v1 and they looked so outdated. At least it didn’t them very long to switch to a new user interface after v1.
If you haven’t heard of EaseUS ToDo Backup and don’t know what it does, it is a software that backs up entire system state including the operating system and installed applications and save it to an image file. The image file can be saved to a CD, DVD, external hard drive, a different partition, or even a network drive and be used to restore back to the state when the image was created. It works like Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image.
EaseUS ToDo Backup Free 3.5 User Interface
I always think that the emergency disk or bootable rescue media is an important feature, more important than EaseUS ToDo’s PreOS, Acronis Startup Recovery Manager or Norton Ghost’s LightsOut because if Windows cannot be booted up or the MBR has been erased, you can use the rescue media as a final resort to boot up the dead computer and perform the restoration. So this is the first feature that I put ToDo Backup to test.
EaseUS ToDo Backup Free 3.5 is able to create 2 different types of bootable disk which is Linux and WinPE. To create the WinPE bootable recovery disk, EaseUS ToDo Backup requires Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK) to be installed where the KB3AIK_EN.iso file is 1.7GB in size. From Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit, I wasn’t able to to create a working bootable emergency disk to an empty USB flash drive. Creating the WinPE bootable disk to USB seemed successful with any errors but booting up the USB shows the error “BOOTMGR is missing. Press any key to restart“. The Linux version failed with the error “Failed to read sector” during creation itself.
I did not give up so I re-image my test system to Windows 7 32bit, reinstalled EaseUS ToDo Backup Free 3.5 and Windows AIK. No problems in creating a linux bootable disk and booting it up. However do note that the Linux version of bootable disk can only be used to restore while the backup feature is disabled. When tried creating the WinPE, this time it failed with the message “Failed to create a bootable disk, please export ISO file and burn it with third party burning software, such as BurnAware.”
Finally, I tested the Export ISO option where EaseUS ToDo Backup creates the emergency disk and saves it to an ISO file which can be used to burn to a CD/DVD. I am able to burn the WinPE ISO to a CD and boot up the computer with it to perform a backup. Remember that Linux emergency disk can only restore while the WinPE emergency disk supports backup.
As for backup, normally you cannot create the backup archive file on the same partition that you are going to backup because you are taking a huge risk in overwriting the files that you want to backup. Symantec Ghost and Acronis has this restriction but weirdly EaseUS ToDo allows this. Meaning you can create a backup image of C drive and save it to C drive. Either ToDo is smart enough to detect that there is enough free space to store the backup image on the same partition OR they forgotten to include this restriction. Either way, I think this is a risky decision.
Mounting a backup image is easy and fast. Simply double click on the .PDB image file and you can access the backup files with the option of opening the file, recover or copy.
I also tried enabling the PreOS startup item but it failed with the error “Disk or partition space not enough, please change destination or clear useless data to try again”.
If I open My Computer, C drive shows 286GB free of 305GB while the D drive shows 240GB free of 290GB. There are still a lot of free space left so what went wrong? This problem has got to do with the hidden System Reserved partition not having enough space. Simply follow the instructions from this article and you will be able to enable the PreOS option after that.
I have not tested the “Recover to dissimilar hardware” feature or in another words Universal Restore as found in Acronis True Image Home Plus Pack but I read from EaseUS forum that there are limitations such as if the source boot partition and system partition locates on two different hard disks then you won’t be able to restore to dissimilar hardware.
EaseUS ToDo Backup Free offers a good alternative to commercial paid imaging software but the stability is no where near Acronis which has a solid 10 years background. Don’t get me wrong, EaseUS ToDo Backup works and can still do image backup with restoration but it comes together with a few hiccups.