10 Best Windows Backup Software for 2024

Overview

Zinstall FullBack is a powerful backup tool that ensures comprehensive protection for your computer. It offers an always-on, complete backup of your entire system, including applications, settings, and files. Unlike traditional backups, FullBack goes beyond restoring just files and allows you to seamlessly restore everything to any replacement computer, regardless of Windows version or hardware. This means you can easily switch devices or recover from a broken computer without losing any data or settings.

Features

Complete System Backup: Unlike traditional backups that only restore files, FullBack provides an always-on, complete backup of your entire computer. It captures your entire system, including applications, settings, and files.

Universal Restore Capability: FullBack goes beyond traditional backups by allowing you to restore everything to any replacement computer, regardless of the Windows version or hardware. This feature is particularly useful if your original computer breaks or if you want to switch to a new device seamlessly.

Easy and Flexible Recovery: FullBack simplifies the recovery process by letting you start working on the replacement computer as if nothing happened. You can also recover individual files and folders, making it convenient for day-to-day use. Additionally, it offers multiple recovery points, similar to a time machine, allowing you to choose specific time snapshots for recovery.

Other notable features of FullBack include the ability to back up to various destinations such as local drives, network-attached storage (NAS), third-party cloud services, and even OneDrive or Dropbox. It also supports backing up to multiple targets simultaneously, providing redundancy and following the "1-2-3" backup rule.

Ease of use

FullBack is designed to be user-friendly, catering to regular non-technical users. You don't need to have extensive knowledge of partitions or file systems to use it; simply run the program and let it handle the backup process.

It's important to note that using a USB external hard drive for backups can minimize the backup time compared to uploading to the cloud. Additionally, FullBack offers both single file restore and full restore options, allowing users to recover specific files or perform a complete system restoration, depending on their needs. If opting for a full restore, a replacement machine is required to recover everything from the backup.

Performance

FullBack provides the flexibility to recover individual files and folders, making it convenient for day-to-day use. With support for various backup destinations such as local drives, NAS, 3rd party cloud services, and even OneDrive or Dropbox, you can choose the option that suits your needs. FullBack also stands out by allowing simultaneous backups to multiple targets, providing redundancy and adhering to the "1-2-3" backup rule. 

Pricing

FullBack offers a 30-day free trial. If you decide to keep the product past the trial, you will be charged $14.90 monthly.

Verdict

Overall, Zinstall FullBack combines advanced backup features with user accessibility, providing a reliable and convenient solution for protecting and restoring your computer data.

Overview

This PC backup software claims over 93 million people have used their product, which is pretty impressive. They also assert their tool provides the most reliable way to keep data secure.

Is that so? Let’s dig deep into it to find the truth.

Ease of Use

Aomei Backupper has a fairly large installer (104 MB). Regardless of this, it took me less than 5 minutes to download and install it.

The user interface, with its retro look, didn’t impress me much. Thankfully, the layout and workflow are intuitive, so even beginners will find it easy to use.

Features

Aomei Backupper Pro allows you to backup your entire system, hard disks, partitions, and individual files and folders.

You can backup data to a local drive, an external drive, and a network storage device — and have a choice of making full, differential, or incremental backups.

The tool supports file synching, which ensures you don’t lose important files.

Various options for scheduling backups are available, like hourly and daily. However, there’s no provision to schedule event-based backups. Also missing is the option to password protect your data.

Features like Compression and Splitting (which splits large files into smaller ones) make it easier for you to save disk space or upload files to a portable device.

Included in the Pro version are various useful tools that allow you to create a bootable USB or CD drive, check backups for errors, open image files, and merge multiple image files into one.

There’s a free version, too, but it lacks the aforementioned tools and certain other features, like System Clone and Differential backup.

Aomei Backupper Pro is compatible with Windows 10, 8.1, 8, Vista, and XP.

Support

Aomei doesn’t offer phone support, nor does it have a support forum. That said, the rich Knowledge Base and Help Documents archive pretty much make up for the lack of a community forum — and its email support team is helpful and efficient. I contacted it a couple of times and received a satisfactory reply within 24 hours each time.

Performance

Aomei Backupper Pro performance was a mixed bag. While it made disk and partition backups faster than any other local backup tool I reviewed, it was the slowest in backing up individual files. However, since it runs in the background and has a light CPU usage, the lack of speed doesn’t really matter.

Price

Aomei Backupper Pro has a 30-day trial period. So play around with it as much as you want.

If you like it enough, you will have to shell out $49.95. One license is for 2 PCs.

Verdict

Aomei Backupper Pro is a decent local backup tool. It offers some useful features, like file synching, and comes with an affordable price tag.

That said, the free version covers almost all the important bases. So you might want to first give it a try — unless, of course, you really need those exclusive features of the Pro version.

Overview

Ease of Use

Features

Support

Free users enjoy email support, as well as access to the EaseUS knowledge base and forum.

Performance

Verdict

Overview

Ease of Use

Features

Support

Performance

Price

• The Standard plan comes with a one-time fee of $59.99. Please note that this plan doesn’t offer cloud backups.
• The Advanced plan is priced at $49.99/year. It includes 250 GB cloud storage, which can be raised to 500 GB.
• The Premium plan has a price tag of $99.99/year. It offers 1 TB free cloud storage, which can be increased to 5 TB for a price.

Verdict

Overview

Ease of Use

Features

Support

Performance

Price

• IDrive Personal offers 2 TB space (which can be increased to 5 TB) and is priced at $69.50 for one year and $139 for two years. Still, at the time of writing, the one-year plan is available for $52.12 and the two-yearly plan for $104.25
• IDrive Business provides 250 TB cloud storage (which can be increased up to 12.5 TB) and has a price tag of $99.50 for one year and $199 for two years. Still, at the time of writing, the one-year plan is available for $74.62 and the two-yearly plan for $149.25.

Verdict

Overview

Ease of Use

Features

Support

Performance

Pricing

• The monthly price for individual and business plans is the same — $6 per computer.
• If you pay for 1 year in advance, the cost is $60.
• In contrast,  a two-year plan costs $100 for individual users and $110 for companies.

Verdict

Overview

Ease of Use

Features

• First, it offers 65 storage destinations, including all the big names like Amazon S3, OneDrive, and Microsoft Azure.
• Second, it covers just about every mixed storage scenario.

Price

Overview

O&O DiskImage is one of the most popular local best PC backup software, so I was eager to test it. And I must say it impressed me with its sensible workflow. What other aces does it have up its sleeve? Let’s find out.

Ease of Use

The installation process is simple and straightforward since there are no meaningful decisions to make. The user interface uses text along with some images to show various backup options that are easy to follow and use.

Features

O&O DiskImage offers all the bread-and-butter features and some more.

You can create disk-wise and file-wise backups, select or deselect sections of a local drive, create differential and incremental backups, and use virtual and network-based storage devices.

Additionally, you can split large files into smaller ones and protect your files with a password.

In addition to these standard features, O&O includes special features like one-click imaging. You can use it to make an image with default options with just a click. That said, if you want, you can customize the settings as well.

Another useful feature is Disk Image to Go, which takes the worry of creating boot media off your shoulders. It automatically creates new boot media on an external hard drive or a USB flash drive.

In case something terrible happens to your computer, you can use the boot media to restore the backup with a single click.

It is compatible with Windows 10, 8.1, 8, and 7.

Support

O&O doesn’t offer phone or live chat support. They don’t have a dedicated forum or a knowledge base, either. The only way you can get help is through the request form on their site.

However, the good part is that they reply fairly quickly. I got a response within 2 business days both times I submitted a query.

Performance

The performance of O&O DiskImage falls somewhere in the middle — not too bad, but not that great, either. It made disk, partition, and file backups at a somewhat languid pace. However, the good part is that, since its lightweight, it doesn’t affect your system’s performance.

Price

O&O DiskImage comes with a 30-day trial period, after which you will have to pay a one-time fee of $49.95 for one PC and $69.95 for five PCs.

Verdict

O&O DiskImage is a great Windows backup software, giving you plenty of options to backup data. It also offers some intelligent features, like One-click Imaging and Disk Imaging to Go. Another plus is the price, which is very reasonable. You might want to give it a try if you are looking for a solid disk imaging tool.

Overview

Paragon has a good reputation and a long standing in the field of data backup and recovery. According to the company, over 6 million users have downloaded its free backup, too, which is quite impressive.

But is the software really that good? Let’s check.

Ease of Use

Installing the Paragon backup tool is easy and simple. However, you’ll have to create a MyParagon account when you first launch the software. Once that’s out of the way, you can go ahead and create your first backup.

The user interface is simple but not very intuitive. For instance, it took me a minute to figure out how to create recovery media. (You have to click the settings icon in the extreme left pane.)

Even though this is free software, it allows you to encrypt the backed up data. In fact, you can even select the type of encryption you want!

Paragon Backup & Recovery 17 is compatible with Windows 10, 8.1, 8, 7, Vista, and XP.

Support

You can submit a service request by logging into your MyParagon account. Paragon promises to resolve customers’ queries within 3 business days. Alternately, you can head to the Paragon forum — which is well-maintained — and submit your question.

Performance

Paragon’s performance was a pleasant surprise. Lightweight and nimble, it completed different types of backups faster than other reviewed freeware.

Verdict

Paragon Backup & Recovery is a perfect choice for all those who want to backup their Windows computer for free and don’t mind missing out on cloud storage options or advanced features, like outlook backup.