Solved AOMEI Backupper (Free Standard Edition) Review

Too much defragmenting will wearing your HDDs out !
Once a month is more then enough.............same for trimming SSD ; once a month ...........

pietcorus2 said:

Too much defragmenting will wearing your HDDs out !
Once a month is more then enough.............same for trimming SSD ; once a month ...........

Click to expand...

So what evidence do you have to support your advice is better than MS who recommend weekly?

Anyway HDDS are so last decade now. I only use them for bulk storage now.

My experience with HDD failures goes back to the late 1970’s, when I started as an engineer at a TV Station. During that time, your local weather guy or gal used big map on the wall, with magnetic symbol depicting High, Lows, Clouds etc the he/she could move around by hand.



The station purchased a computerized weather display system from a company called Colorgraphics based in Madison WI. It was the very first weather presentation computer, developed by 2 TV Engineers at a local station in Madison. It made them millionaires when they sold their company & patents to what is now Weather Central. The “talent” would stand in front a green screen & the system would display all of the bells & whistles – radar, cloud, rain, lightning animations.



At any rate, their system used a 50Mb hard drive (Cromemco, I believe). It had 2 big floppy drives for the weather system (data acquisition & display etc & software updates) up front. Inside it had 4 or 5 big platters, stacked one on top of the other. These discs were larger than LPs & quite thick. It took awhile for the disks to get up to speed & it was loud! We had ton build a sound-proof enclosure & ran cool air in from a feed from one of our many ACs on the roof (TV stations require tons [pun intended] of AC).



When this thing crashed, it literally crashed. It sounded like somebody was inside the enclosure with a hammer. As this was a rather new use of this technology, the crashes happened quite often. Impossible to repair locally, Colorgraphics had a warehouse full of these drives. They would overnight a refurbished unit at no cost (as long as we sent the old one back). Needless to say, the old weather map with its magnets stayed on the wall for a few years.



Sorry for my walk down memory lane. I started reading this thread because I have used the free version of AOMEI for many years & it has performed as expected. I’ve only needed it to bail me out a few times, but it has worked flawlessly when needed.

Bree said:

Is that true though? A defragmented HDD means less wear on the head positioning mechanism, as it doesn't have to thrash about to read all of a file. The trade-off may not be as clear-cut as you think.

Click to expand...

That's true but the heads really fly around during defragmentation.

Some people don't know this but the heads in a HDD never touch the surface of the disk. If they do, damage occurs. Therefore, physical wear of the disk platter is non-existent. What wears are the motor making it spin and the fittings and joints on the arms that hold the heads

Dch48 said:

That's true but the heads really fly around during defragmentation.

Some people don't know this but the heads in a HDD never touch the surface of the disk. If they do, damage occurs. Therefore, physical wear of the disk platter is non-existent. What wears are the motor making it spin and the fittings and joints on the arms that hold the heads

Click to expand...

This is all ridiculously being exaggerated. Windows 10/11 quietly defrags in background and the longer you leave it, the more it has to do each time it embarks on a defrag.

The biggest killer of any moving part is HEAT (causes expansion). So extending defrag intervals (and hence longer period of defragging when being done) will MORE likely cause damage.

Doing a small amount of defragging moderately frequently also offsets the amount of head movement when using the pc.

The only reason one can really have to extend the defag period is if the pc is hardly used but even then a bit pointless, because if a drive was moderately defragmented, all the work would be done in first defrag, and subsequent defrags would be much quicker and less onerous.

So I wish people would stop sprrading FUD about something they do not understand.

Dch48 said:

But in that case you wouldn't be able to use a backup from any drive, internal or external. Not without a working power supply. Even in a notebook, the drives could be removed. Personally I have never seen a power supply failure that destroyed everything. The worst thing I have seen is when the mobo in my niece's machine developed a short. That's one machine in 23 years. I'll go with those odds.

I also have yet to see a HDD fail. I'll stick with my internal drives and their 50% faster backup times vs my externals. Maybe it's just me, but for long term data storage, I still prefer a HDD over a SSD. SSD's can be easily destroyed by just a static charge.

Click to expand...

I've had a few HDDs just die without warning. I've also had a few HDDs do the click of death. What is the Click of Death?

Dch48 said:

That's true but the heads really fly around during defragmentation.

Some people don't know this but the heads in a HDD never touch the surface of the disk. If they do, damage occurs. Therefore, physical wear of the disk platter is non-existent. What wears are the motor making it spin and the fittings and joints on the arms that hold the heads

Click to expand...

Have you ever taken a HDD apart? They have very strong magnets that keep the heads floating.

Winuser said:

Have you ever taken a HDD apart? They have very strong magnets that keep the heads floating.

Click to expand...

Yes, but when they don't float is when problems arise. A lot of people assume that the heads are in constant contact with the platters like the heads in a tape drive. That is not the case.

Dch48 said:

Yes, but when they don't float is when problems arise. A lot of people assume that the heads are in constant contact with the platters like the heads in a tape drive. That is not the case.

Click to expand...

Probably thinking about how a phonograph record works. :)

Winuser said:

Probably thinking about how a phonograph record works. :)

Click to expand...

That's an even better analogy.

And so now here we go with what happens when you don't use . . . Macrium, Aomei, EaseUS, (your choice of app) to back up your system.

I've been working (on and off) with one of my laptops for class this Thursday with a clean install of Windows 10 and Windows 11 as a dual boot system. I want to use it to teach my students how to backup and restore with Macrium Reflect. (Sorry, Aomei fans, but my students overruled me on teaching Aomei first. It will be next, though.) Yeh, I listen to what they want.

So, after the system was built, it worked just fine. I just never got around to backing up the first install. After all, I'm going to teach my students how to use Macrium, right?

Wrong! Something happened with dual boot, and I can no longer get to Windows 10! Even using my Macrium Rescue USB didn't help.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda . . .

At this point, I'm rethinking dual boot and think I'll just go with Windows 10 because none of my students have a dual boot system. That way the demonstration for them to follow will be more familiar.

Dang right, I'm agonna back up the system the minute it's installed and I have Macrium and Aomei on it!

Hmmm, since it's going to eventually be a dual boot system, maybe I should have a lesson on dual booting . . . we'll see what they think of that.

Did you get the boot menu to choose the OS?

Dch48 said:

Did you get the boot menu to choose the OS?

Click to expand...

I did when I first clean installed 10 and 11, but somewhere along the way, it was gone. I just finished getting the ISO from uupdump, so next step . . .

Wynona said:

I did when I first clean installed 10 and 11, but somewhere along the way, it was gone. I just finished getting the ISO from uupdump, so next step . . .

Click to expand...

Just a thought check msconfig to see if the timeout isn't set to zero.

Fabler2 said:

Just a thought check msconfig to see if the timeout isn't set to zero.

Click to expand...

Too late; already reinstalled. And it could be, but I thought that stopped happening aeons ago!

However, the Rescue Disk should have done its job if that were the case. At least it did way back when . . .

The free version has removed the recovery environment option.
Bootable USB is obviously a better choice, but slower and less convenient.

TairikuOkami said:

The free version has removed the recovery environment option.
Bootable USB is obviously a better choice, but slower and less convenient.

Click to expand...

Its much faster when placed on sticky , you can use Ventoy also , and put all your backuppers and partition-tools , etc , on it ..............I did , awsome , everything on one bootable Ventoy-stick...........

pietcorus2 said:

Its much faster when placed on sticky

Click to expand...

Not for me, booting from SSD, I was able to boot + restore within 2 mins. USB 2.0 alone starts for 2 mins.

TairikuOkami said:

Not for me, booting from SSD, I was able to boot + restore within 2 mins. USB 2.0 alone starts for 2 mins.

Click to expand...

Using USB 3.2 ...........VEEEERY FAAAAST !

TairikuOkami said:

The free version has removed the recovery environment option.
Bootable USB is obviously a better choice, but slower and less convenient.

Click to expand...

Was that recovery environment similar to the add recovery option to "boot menu of Reflect?".

If so, you could copy files from usb drive to a small partition and create a boot entey using easybcd.

I have a batch file that adds winpe partitions to boot menu which is basically a copy of one @KYHI included in his posts some years ago). I would be happy to include here with @KYHI's permission. All credit is to him.

As an aside, if I have interpreted the version comparisons correctly, I see V8.9 strangely does incremental backups but not differential backups.

If that is true, a work around would be move the 1st created incremental to a different folder so you are always doing 1st incremental (1st incremental a differential being the same as a differential). A lot of faffing around though.

I do accept having incrementals is the one area where free version scores over Reflect free version.

Having said that, AOMEI is a fine tool but my two main gripes are:

1) it does not fully backup the all the partitions - it leaves out the MSR partition in UEFI mode - Ok no big deal as it is a seemingly useless partition but it is not compliant with MS UEFI structure.

2) More importantly, when doing a partition recovery, you can only select one at a time i.e you cannot select two. For me personally, this is a show stopper.