If you have ever lost personal data you will know how much of an inconvenience it can be, therefore choosing the correct backup software can be an important decision, recently an EASEUS representative asked me to review their backup software which is called Todo Backup Home 2.0.2, this is free for home users, however there are paid for versions which offer more advanced features. Todo Backup runs on Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.
You can download EASEUS Todo Backup Home 2.0.2 for free here, the download is roughly 70MB in size and once downloaded the installation process is easy to follow, there are no custom settings to choose, all you have to do is accept the license agreement and click next a few times, once installed you will have to restart your PC.
Once your computer reboots you will notice a new icon on your desktop, when you open up the program you are greeted with an extremely user-friendly UI (see image below) which lists the four main options available to you, these are Backup, Recovery, Schedule Backup and Clone, if you need help you can click the question mark icon in the top right-hand corner of the program’s UI.
I will now talk about the program’s main features:
Backup
When you click on backup you are given two options, either “Disk and Partition Backup” to backup an entire drive, or “File Backup” to backup specific files and folders, for testing purposed I chose to carry out a file backup.
Once you have chosen to carry out a file backup you are asked to name and describe the backup, it is important that you describe the backup in detail as it can come in handy when restoring your data, once named and described you can also choose whether you want it to be an incremental backup, this can be useful if you plan to back up the same folders on a regular basis.
The next screen you see can bee seen below, as you can see there are two main options to choose from, you can either backup selected files or backup selected file types, for my backup I will be backing up “My Documents”, however the file type backup can be useful if you want to backup all of your picture files (photos), music, video, document files or financial files, there is also another neat option which allows you to backup email files (such as your Microsoft Outlook .pst files, your Outlook Express messages, your web address book and even your Mozilla Thunderbird files).
Now you have chosen what to backup you can choose extra backup options and a destination, here you can choose whether you want to store the backup on a local disc, CD, DVD or FTP, there is also a “Calculate” button which tells you how much storage space the backup will take. If you want to access more advanced options simply click “Options”, here you can choose to password protect and encrypt your backups, split the backups into certain sized parts, setup an FTP store locations and send email notifications when backups succeed / fail.
I tested the functionality of backing-up to hard disk and also to CD, to backup to 192MB of data to a local hard disk it took just 2 minutes, to backup the same amount of data to CD it took 6 minutes, having configured the “send email notifications” with my email settings I received a confirmation email telling me the backup was successful, sadly this email didn’t give any more details than that, but at least you know your data is safe, even if you are away (you can see the email below).
Recovery
If you somehow lose your data you will obviously want to restore it from your backups, if you backup to removable media you must have it at hand, on the Todo Backup Home’s main page simply click “Recovery”, choose whether it is a file backup or disk backup you want to restore”, choose from the list of all of your backups and then choose which files you want to recover and where you want to restore them to, if you password protect your backups you will have to enter your password to proceed. The whole process is pretty simple to follow and depending on the amount of data you want to restore it doesn’t take too long.
Schedule Backup
Setting up a backup schedule is a great way of ensuring that you have up-to-date copies of your files, the schedule backup features allows you to choose all of the options we spoke about during the “Backup” section of this review, however you can then choose for it to automatically run at certain times, if it is a lot of data that you want to backup you should probably choose an incremental backup.
Below you can see a screen below which allows you to set the schedule, here you can set it to backup later in the day, or perhaps schedule a daily, weekly or monthly backup, also the backups can be event triggered, one example of this could allows you to backup every-time a user logs off. If you use the schedule feature alongside the email notification feature you can see whether your backups are successful no matter where you are, also if your computer is off when the backup is scheduled you can set the backup to go ahead upon system startup.
Clone
I do not have a spare drive to test the clone functionality, however if you want to backup an entire drive’s partition(s) Todo Backup Home let’s you do just this, this in affect would be a way of getting your computer up and running quickly if your hard disk failed as it backs up your installed programs, operating system, files and settings. Cloning a disk can take some time, therefore you may just want to do this once every few months (providing you are also doing regular file backups).
Conclusion
Over the years I have used a lot of different backup solutions, some of which cost a lot some of which prove to be too complicated for the “average user”, I have to say that in terms of functionality and features Todo Backup Home 2.0.2 is by no means lacking, the interface manages to show you everything you need to see without being too cluttered, also if you are an advanced user all the features you want are not too far away. If I could change two things about Todo Backup Home I would make the email reports more descriptive (perhaps tell you what backup task succeeded / failed and list the files backed up), also it would be nice if there was a simple way for home users to buy online storage from EASEUS and output their backups to this online storage locations.
The software is only free for home users, however I would highly the software to business, you can download a 15 day trial here. There are three different purchasable versions at present Todo Backup Workstation 2.0 which costs $39.00, Todo Backup Server 2.0 which costs $199 and Todo Backup Technician 2.0 which costs $799.00, click on the name of the versions for full details.
