Windows backup software review - 'Bare Metal Showdown 2' - Five disaster recovery programs tested to destruction

One of our most popular newsletter articles was in our October 2008 newsletter when we tested "bare metal" recovery software. What is "bare metal" recovery? Basically this means restoring a computer from scratch, with a completely blank hard drive. One of the most common ways home users can do this, is by creating a bootable 'rescue CD' that can access a backup image of their old hard drive and restore it to the new one. Several packages on the market claim to do this, but which ones work the best? Last time our top recommendations went to Paragon Drive Backup and Nero BackItUp. Who will be crowned king of our 2010 disk backup software review? Read on to find out.

The contenders

We will start the review and bench test with an overview of this years contenders:-

Acronis True Image Home 2010

The last time we compared disk imaging software, way back in October 2008, we were so disappointed wth the performance of Acronis True Image that we withdrew our tutorials. Luckily, True Image 2010 looks and feels like a whole new product. Its user interface looks polished and is quick and easy to navigate. Most importantly, there were no unexpected crashes during our tests.

True Image Home 2010 has a fantastic feature set that caters for almost every possible backup need. You can clone hard drives and partitions, you can create images of hard drives, (including incremental images). You can mount existing image files and explore them, extracting files from them, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The software has several potentially very useful tools for the PC enthusiast. The "Try & Decide" mode takes a snapshot of your computers hard drives, allowing you to tinker with new software or make system wide changes to your computers configuration all in the knowledge that it can be undone with the click of a mouse. There's also a "Nonstop Backup" mode, which creates rolling, incremental images of your computer system every five minutes, meaning you can go back to any point in time should something go wrong. Of course, running such an aggressive (but thorough) backup strategy does have some impact on the system, but expert users can schedule incremental imaging to take place at any interval they choose.

If that wasn't enough, True Image can even do file level backups, including e-mails (only Outlook and Windows Mail are supported however) and program settings for several popular programs. For this round-up, we're interested in its disk imaging capabilities. We will show you what happened when we put the software through its paces later on in this backup software review.

Easeus Todo Backup 1.1

This product is a new contender in our roundup and one that has the huge advantage of being completely free. Sporting an easy to navigate user interface, Todo backup can copy hard drives or partitions, create images of drives or partitions and mount existing backup images allowing you to explore them and extract files. As you might expect, some of the advanced features you get in the commercial alternatives are missing. Nevertheless, Todo Backup has a fantastic feature set and all for free.

Can a free disk imaging program perform on par with it's commercial alternatives? Keep reading to find out.

Nero BackItUp 4

Once part of the popular Nero CD/DVD burning suite, this backup program is now marketed separately from the rest of the Nero programs. Nero BackItUp can create images of drives and partitions but disappointingly cannot copy a hard drive directly to another hard drive. It is also not possible to mount a hard drive image and explore its contents. However, Nero BackItUp does include a file synchronization tool and the facility to do file level backups.

User interface wise, BackItUp is clean and professional looking though our major concern is with the lack of information it provides when making or restoring a backup. We will explain more about this when we get to the performance tests.

Norton Ghost 15

At one time, Norton Ghost was the program to use to create an exact copy (or image) of a hard drive. Ghost 15 seems a long way removed from those days of quick and easy backup. The software is designed around creating incremental images of your system, just like you can do in Acronis True Image. However, the user interface is confusing and poorly designed. Just creating a straightforward image of a hard drive is a challenge in itself, as is restoring such an image correctly.

Norton Ghost can copy hard drives but this feature was disabled in the trial version, so our benchmarks for Ghost are somewhat incomplete. Nevertheless on the awkwardness of the interface alone we would not recommend it.

Paragon Drive Backup 10

Drive Backup 10 was the product that we were expecting to perform the best as far as power users were concerned. Having used previous versions to restore backups and system images on other machines, the performance of the product has, in our past experience, been solid.

Despite having a more 'old school', intimidating user interface, navigating around Drive Backup 10 is relatively easy. There are no file backup tools on offer here, but the usual set of disk cloning, drive to image and image to drive tools are all present and correct. The software also supports incremental imaging and mounting of image files. There is even a disk sector editor, where you can peek at the raw bytes on your drive and pretend you know what they all mean.

Now that all the contenders have been introduced, it is time to announce the results of our tests.

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