Backup Your PC With Ease For Free Using Easeus Todo Backup [Windows]

Backing up your data is one of those things in life that you really won’t understand until disaster strikes, by which time it’s too late. For most people who haven’t experienced data-loss, the task of backing up just seems like such a good idea in theory, but so much effort in reality.

But take my advice, use this incredible freeEaseus Todo Backup software and it’ll be so easy you won’t even have to think about it.  And if the worst does come to the worst, and you do lose any data, then you will be covered.

Types Of Backup

There are 2 basic types of backup you can do with Todo Backup, so first take a moment to think about your requirements.

File & Folder Backup

This is the simplest form of backup there is, and basically just makes a copy of files. These kind of basic backups are suitable when your documents or data are the most important thing, but you don’t care about your operating system or the applications installed on it. As you have a fine control over what to backup, the size of your backup is determined by your data only. However, once you’ve taken a full backup, you can run “incremental backups” subsequently, which only backs up the files that have changed. This saves space and time, while still giving you an up to date copy of files should the worst happen.

Partition & Drive Backup

This can save a copy of your entire computer, including the operating system. It’s the best choice if your computer is your primary work machine and getting it up and running again quickly is important, or if you have a lot of applications installed that you don’t want to lose. With a full partition and drive backup, you can simply change the broken drive and restore everything back to it in a few hours. Of course, these kind of backups will take longer to perform, and they include everything on that partition, so they tend to grow large. You can reduce the size with compression though.

Easeus Todo Backup

This handles both of these effortlessly, and allows you to make a bootable restore CD or USB. One point to bear in mind is that while you can backup to a shared network drive (like one of the awesome drobos we gave away last week), you cannot restore from one. If you want to be able to restore your whole system, you must backup to a physical device plugged into the computer, such as another internal drive (see my guide to adding another internal drive) or a USB hard drive.

Automated, No Effort Backups

Automation is the key to back-ups. If you have to actually launch some software every time you want to update the backup, then believe me after the first time you never actually will.

Hands-On Test

To see how the software really performs, I decided to do a full system backup of my Windows machine. The whole system is only about 10GB as it’s primarily for work. To test the restore capabilities, I’ll delete a bunch of random critical Windows files to simulate a system error, then change the drive, and attempt to restore from the backup using a bootable CD made using the Easeus software.

To start, I chose Schedule Backup -> Disk and partition backup, and gave it a name. When it comes to choosing what to backup, I made sure to select only the main Windows drive as I already had the backup drive plugged in. I then chose the backup drive E: as the destination – the USB drive I had plugged in. Be sure to check the box “Check Backup Integrity“, or there is a possibility that your backup will be corrupt. I chose a Daily backup at 8:45pm, and made sure to enter my administrator account password.

While that was running, I went ahead and made a bootable rescue USB key from the tools menu.

Make sure you don’t choose your backup drive if that’s also plugged in through USB. The process only took a few seconds. I then waited for the backup to finish, which according to the log took less than 10 minutes.

Curiously, the backup image was only about 5GB – I checked later and by default a basic amount of compression is applied. Less compression will make the backups quicker but larger, more will take longer but result in a smaller file. Regardless, I went ahead and deleted random files (don’t try this at home) until it refused to boot Windows, then unplugged the main drive and installed a new one. Just to complicate things, I replaced the original drive with a smaller one. I then booted from the USB drive. With the USB backup drive plugged in, it automatically recognized it and found the backup image, and soon enough I was choosing the drive I wanted to restore the system to.

You can even resize the partitions during the restore process. 10 minutes later, Windows was back up and running. Fantastic!

Summary

Even if Easeus Todo Backup wasn’t free, it would still be one of the best backup solutions for Windows. It is free though – and with features otherwise only found in expensive packages, it’s also incredibly simple to set up a regular automated full backup plan. If you don’t already have a decent backup solution in place, I strongly suggest you download this now. There are also full guides on the site for every type of backup operation you could want.

Again, here’s that download link for this incredible piece of software. Let us know your experiences in the comments if you’re a current user – or what backup software you use instead?