EASEUS Todo Backup Free Disk Imaging Software (Norton Ghost Alternative)

Macrium Reflect is a great software to create a full backup of your hard drive or partition so that you can restore it back exactly the way it was when you created the backup. I have the full version of Macrium Reflect installed on my Acer laptop running Windows 7 and I find it very useful whenever I want to install and test any software because I can first create a full backup and then if anything goes wrong, I can simply restore it back. FYI, I never used System Restore and that’s the first thing I disable after installing Windows :P Don’t ask why, I just prefer to put my trust in disk imaging rather than Windows System Restore. Recently I got to know another disk cloning software which is FREE from EASEUS called Todo Backup.

EASEUS Todo Backup is comprehensive backup software, which not only provides convenient user-interface to simplify your tasks but also enables you to backup and restore an image of your partitions or entire hard disk. EASEUS Todo Backup enables users to backup and restore data in multiple ways for their data security. At the same time, for user-friendly operation, EASEUS Todo Backup also provides journaling.

Let’s check out EASEUS Todo Backup…

The main function for EASEUS Todo Backup is Backup, Restore, Check image file, Mount, Unmount and Clone disk. When I say backup, it doesn’t mean backing up a files or folders. It means backing up the entire current state of your computer into a file. For example, let’s say you created a full backup on 1st January 2009. Then after 8 months of messing around with Windows, it became very corrupted and unable to boot up. So now you restore back the Windows using the image that you created 8 months, it actually gives you back Windows the way it was when you created the image on 1st January 2009. Get it?

The program itself is pretty self explanatory. When you launch the program, you will see 3 main big buttons which is Backup, Restore and Clone. Mount is for mounting the image file as a virtual physical partition to explore or copy files in the backup image.

EASEUS Todo Backup also includes a Media Builder where it allows us to create a bootable CD/DVD. I’d say that the bootable disc is a must to create because most of the time you’ll only need to restore your computer is when you cannot boot up Windows. To create bootable media, run Todo Backup 1.0 Media Builder wizard by selecting “Tools” and “Create Bootable CD”. You can also run Bootable Media Builder without loading Todo Backup 1.0 by selecting “Programs”-> “EASEUS Todo Backup 1″-> “Bootable Media Builder” from the Start menu. You can also directly burn a bootable disc from the ISO image file located in C:\Program Files\EASEUS\EASEUS Todo Backup 1.0\bin\image.iso. When you boot up the computer with the boot CD, you should see a screen like the image below.

Just like Macrium Reflect, Todo Backup 1.0 bootable CD can ONLY restore and does not create backups. The backup can only be done in Windows…

I tried creating an image on my desktop running Windows XP Professional SP3 that’s taking up only 2.55GB of space. I saved the image to my second hard drive. The backup with no compression took 1 minute, 10 seconds to complete and image file size is also 2.55GB since the compression is disabled. Then I tried the normal compression, it took 3 minutes, 43 seconds to complete and compressed the file size to 1.28GB. As for restoration, the not compressed image took 4 minutes and as for the normal compression image took 4 minutes, 25 seconds. Looks like the compression only speeds up the backup process and not much on the restore.

Todo Backup v1.0 supports Windows 2000 (SP4), XP (32 and 64 bit), Vista (32 and 64 bit), Server 2003 (32 and 64 bit), and Server 2008 (32 and 64 bit). Verified not working on Windows 7 because I tried creating a backup and my computer crashed.

[ Download EASEUS Todo Backup ]