Help me to decide: AOMEI or EaseUS or Macrium

Up front: I know there has been a lot of threads about these products. I have read a lot of them.

That said, I hope you folks can give me a bit of advice on what to choose, based on your experience.

Your Experience on support,
on restore and explore images,
on EUFI support,
on WinPE CD/DVD,
on incremental backups

I'd like to choose 1 of these three.
(i.e. neither Paragon, nor Acronis, nor any other)

Macrium is usd.45 when it comes to incremental backups and filebackups.
Also I see their upgrade charge of usd.34

I think AOMEI is not listed in the 'polls' http://goo.gl/n3LWvr

Thanks
-
later:
just discovered - definitely a nice feature in EaseUS : able to explore image backups directly with Windows Explorer. AOMEI requires to first 'mount' the images.

 

I've had decent results with both Easus and Aomei but I much prefer Aomei. More the attitude of the company than any technical reason. Aomei has improved vastly over the last year. I'm more impressed with good results in cloning than than regular backups. When a system boots that I expected to have to do some tweaking to before it would boot normally after cloning it to a smaller partition on a different disk, I'm impressed.

 

If you want free go with AOMEI Backupper, it's the clear winner! The free version of Macrium Reflect is too limited as it does not offer incremental/differential backup. The free version of EaseUS did not work reliably for me.

If you have no problem paying for a license, you should d/l a trial version of each of the following (imho the best of breed): Drive Snapshot, IFW/IFL/IFD, and Macrium Reflect (Std.), to see which one works best for you.

Cruise

 

I thought it was sp for you. I thought SP was the best when it comes to speed and everything.

 

I also had reliabliity issues with earlier versions of EaseUS, but their ToDo v8 is rock solid and definitely worth a look.

 

I'm using Macrium Reflect Standard and like it. Whole system partition backup is done in 5 minutes, incremental backups are created in 1 minute. I had to restore few times. It took me less than 10 minutes and never failed me so far.
I don't know how other two are doing since I've never tested them.

 

That could very well be true, as I haven't used it for a couple of years!

 

wiwui, the 'best disk-imager for you' depends a lot on your level of comfort in using it, so (as Cruise advises) download a few of those suggested here and try them out.

My favorite is Drive Snapshot because it is tiny in size, portable (a very nice feature) and extremely reliable. Also, it is one of the very few programs that allows you to initiate a restore of your system volume while you are using Windows.

pv

 

Hey pv, I know you really like DS and that you are using it successfully with RB, but isn't DS relatively expensive?

 

$45.28 USD Single Workstation

 

Well a lifetime license costs 39 Euro or about $45 (US), but here's a way around that... as sure as night follows day, they release a new version every month, so by downloading a new 30-days trial every month you can simply (and legally) continue using a trial version! That said, I love DS so I bought a license a few years ago.

pv

 

I've been using AOMEI (which is working well) but I think I'll give DS a try. Actually, $45 isn't bad at all for a lifetime license.

 

Peter, could you elaborate on how SP has "slowed down" for you? I haven't used Macrium in quite some time, but have found SP to be remarkably fast on my 8.1 machines with respect to doing full, hot images.

 

How do you know that "the relative differences hold"? Besides, this only applies to your hardware. Both the relative and absolute times may be different in other machines.

 

Thank you, Peter. I'll post the numbers I have on one of my machines using SP. The times involve hot images for ~22GB on an 8.1 desktop machine (SSD) with an i7 and 16GB RAM (standard compression). I really can't imagine that any other imaging product would produce faster times, at least not significantly faster.

To internal SSD: 1:20
To internal HDD: 1:27
To USB3 Flash: 1:58
To external USB3 HDD: 1:36

 

I use EaseUS Todo Backup Advanced Server 4.5 for years & years now. Used it hundreds of times never one failure. Like the restore to dissimilar hardware feature.

LOL there were a couple times years apart where I tried to restore a 64 bit image to 32 bit architecture. Duh.

 

As said before AIOMEI Std (Free) is excellent and even offers Win PE/RE recovery media. If it works fine on your system I'll go with it. If not, paid Macrium is the next best thing, unbeatable for speed. I would also consider R-Drive Image from R-TT.com, very solid and requires no online activation.

 

I have used all three and I like AOMEI Backupper best. It is a wonderful combination of versatility, speed, and simplicity.
Take a glance at this https://www.raymond.cc/blog/10-comm...-features-and-backuprestore-speed-comparison/
AOMEI Backupper is mentioned best or top in most categories. It really excels in speed.

 

Dear friends, thank you ALL for your input.
I really appreciate it!

Note I have all 3 software installed and whilst all 3 are 'free', in basic versions.
(I don't mind paying for it, considering the small fee)

Basically all are doing roughly the same as far as creating images is concerned.
It then gets down to things like how fast is the support, how active is the forum.
Also things like how easy or problemful is restoring to a partition with a slightly different size, e.g. a windows 60GB image restored to a partition of 90GB.

Merging images

Virtual Machine support, i.e. migrate drive from physical machine to Virtual machine or convert system to virtual environment. EaseUS supports this.

Scripting support? Does anybody run a scheduled backup e.g. 1x per week on a given day at pc start?

Browse backups (Macrium->Windows Explorer,assign drive letter by user, EuseUS: Explorer directly,no driveletter necessary, AOMEI: Explorer, assign driveletter by AOMEI)

Drag and drop user interface (macrium)
Reorder & resize partitions ?

@Masterblaster thanks for the link (Raymond) - I've seen it. AOMEI is indeed fast.

On my system, speeds of launching are as follows (uptil the point that you can start using it)
AOMEI : 3 seconds
EaseUS: 11 seconds
Macrium:45 seconds (it scans all drives/partitions. It is doing this each launch)

Creating Image of Windows C-drive (from 'start' uptil 'completed' or 'finished')
AOMEI : 7:05 min - 23.8GB
EaseUS : 7:45 min - 26.4GB
Macrium:11:09 min = 23.5GB

Macrium will release v6 very soon, maybe speed has improved.

 

" Best Back up software ? "

It's a tricky subject for me.

A bit like buying a motorbike helmet.
I wouldn't want to find out the hard way that what I have is useless !

I've been using EaseUS ( free version ) for years but only ever use it as a "safety net"
in case my laptop is stolen or the hard disc dies.
So in that sense , it has never been " Put to the question " , because I haven't needed it.

Reading this thread has made me think again .... I've got an older 250 GB ext. Hard drive
so I think I'll try an extra back-up on to it and use AOMEI.

..... A " Belt and braces " approach.