EaseUS Todo Backup Free 4.0 review

Commercial backup applications typically offer a range of useful tools to smooth the process of protecting your system and files, often focused transparent backup with little or no user interaction. Freeware backup applications, on the other hand, tend to be blunt instruments, with crude copying functions and user interfaces.

Not so Todo Backup. The simple tabbed interface hides a robust set of backup options that allow a decent level of control over how and when you execute backup routines, as well as a useful collection of other disk utilities. The home tab is the main launch point for backup, recovery, disk and partition cloning and other basic disk tools. Backups come in the form of a full system backup or a file/partition backup, both of which are conducted through a wizard interface. The former is a frighteningly rushed process – the only option you have is where to save the final image file – executed without ever being told what is included in a system backup. The file/partition backup section is thankfully more advanced.

The file/partition backup interface provides access to a collection of options that are standard issue in paid-for applications. Backup routines create full, differential or incremental backups. A full backup makes a copy of the entire backup target, while differential backups record the changes made since a last full backup and incremental backups record only those changes since the last incremental backup. The scheduling facility allows you to initiate daily, weekly or monthly backups, in addition to time-interval and event-initiated backups. You can’t burn your backup files to media directly within Todo Backup, although you can split backup images to suit your target media – as long as it’s a CD, DVD or Zip drive (once you brush the dust off). You can transfer your backup files to a remote server via ftp from within the application, but otherwise they are initially stored on a local or network hard disk, leaving you to manage them manually.

Todo Backup 4.0 lacks sophisticated backup consolidation and management routines that can significantly reduce the total volume of a series of incremental or differential backups, however. Although you can focus backup routines on individual files or a selection of files and folders, there is no file filtering. This means that you can’t ask TodoBackup to save all your .jpg photo files, or all your .mp3 music files. Neither does Todo Backup 4.0 provide Time Machine-style continuous data protection backup, a recent but common and incredibly useful feature in many paid-for backup applications.

The proof of any backup is in the restore, and we had no trouble bringing our backed-up files back to life. For system recovery both Linux-based and Windows PE-based restore environments can be used (the latter as an extra download) and both make the system restore process easy. Restoring files from within Windows is also simple – you can open an archive directly in Windows Explorer and select individual files to restore or return an entire backup to your computer using the restore routines in the Todo Backup application itself.

It’s hard to argue with the price, but although Todo Backup 4.0 is a competent backup utility, we definitely missed the more advanced options available in paid for products such as Altaro Oops!Backup. That package is only £29 and provides continuous data protection and backup management to give you more peace of mind.