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It’s like AOMEItech Backupper — or OEM Dell, HP, Lenovo, and so on — in that it can make a partition on the hard drive to backup to and restore from, only unlike OEMs, it can make that restore partition current, adding new user files.
It offers to access that partition to restore it during boot by tapping the [ F3 ] key — if your Windows fails, just reboot, tap [ F3 ], and supposedly restore to the condition that was last backed up.
And it promises to make a boot USB flash drive, presumably to access and restore that partition if the main OS partition won’t even boot.
All good ( I did not test ).
Suggestions for improvement:
Auto analyze the drive and offer to move and shrink existing partitions to make room for a backup / restore partition, otherwise, to be best effective, I’d have to use another tool to do that, then use this tool.
Offer selectable insight on what can and will be backed up — Operating System directories, User directories, or everything, or selectable additional directories, for example, I have many ROOT directories outside the OS and User area for Install, DCIM, Backup, Audiobooks, Downloads, Ebooks, Music, Movies, Videos, even my User Documents are in the Root, but only some of those are set as User Location for their name, so would this program auto-check that C:\Documents is my User Documents location, or would I have to, or even have the opportunity to, select it manually, every time, or automatically in a backup set on demand.
Options before backup and during restore, such as, if I’m restoring to refresh the operating system, which Microsoft itself declines to do, or to restore the as running operating system, which may have backed up a virus or other failure, am I restoring to fix a Windows failure or a virus invasion, am I restoring to replace lost or damaged files due to virus, idiocy, or hard drive failure, can I backup to CDs or thumb drives now that thumb drives are gargantuan, can I backup to an external USB hard drive, can I restore to any computer after backing up to an external hard drive, can I yank the internal drive and use it as an external drive to restore to a new drive or even to an already running drive in any computer?
If the backup partition is too small, what happens?
During restore, does it simply overwrite existing files, or ask, or wipe existing directories before restore?
If the restore can’t find enough space on my OS partition, what happens?
Because this tool is new to us, these explorations should be done by the vendor to show their understanding of end-user situations and show their appropriateness for which end-user situations they are addressing, and especially tell us in the program what conditions it will not address, such as too little space for any task, and enable us to plan to address that either inside the program, or on our own outside the program.
I think this is meant to be an OEM restore tool, with the added feature of including User files on occasion instead of just returning the drive to an OOB Out Of Box fresh installation, though it can probably be used for that, too — their web page shows computer makers as their customers.
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