Home › Forums › SharewareOnSale Deals Discussion › Isoo Backup and System Restore / Jan 22 2019 › Reply To: Isoo Backup and System Restore / Jan 22 2019
This is hardly a new product, being simply a renamed version of Eassos Backup and System Restore (according to Isoo’s company profile link Isoo is actually Eassos – not to be confused with EaseUS! – rather than a remarketer) which has been sold since mid-2013.
The ‘eassos’ Isoo.com link provided leads to information which seems to answer most of Peter’s questions:
a. It appears simply to make a conventional backup image of the system disk (or system partition with any required supporting partitions), with optional additional incremental images to support staged recovery of the backed-up partition(s) to any backed-up time (even the free version of AOMEI Backupper does the same, and more, though the Acronis-based OEM freebies from the likes of Seagate and Western Digital did not last I knew). What this means is that the only control provided is over what gets included in the image(s), and the stored image will over-write the entire partition into which it’s restored without any ability to preserve existing material in the partition. Whether the saved image can be accessed independently to restore individual files does not seem to be mentioned.
b. Its apparent default to placing the backup image(s) in a local partition on the same disk seems imprudent, given that this would certainly not protect the backup across a whole-disk failure (one of the explicit perils it claims to protect against) and might well not protect against sufficiently nasty viruses which did not limit themselves to the system partition, though should help repair user errors and faulty (but not malicious) software.
c. Given that it emphasizes being a simple, easy-to-use backup mechanism its failure to include general partition-management capabilities is hardly surprising (and Eassos does sell its own partition manager under the name DiskGenius – formerly PartitionGuru – which includes both normal partition-management functions and backup/restore functions). It does, however, appear to offer to shuffle unused space within existing partitions on the system disk to create a target partition for the image(s) if an existing partition seems inadequate, though how much detailed control the user has over this is unclear.
As for the problems which two users each noted (twice) here, they do not inspire confidence and could have arisen either from vendor inexperience with GPT-partitioned drives (their frequent references to MBRs perhaps offering a clue here) or from confusing choices presented to the user. The bottom line is that while I find nothing in this which would encourage me to forsake more tried-and-true (and free) solutions such as those from EaseUS, AOMEI, Macrium, Paragon, and some open-source live CD offerings, it does not appear to be quite the piece of trash some here seem to think it is (and DiskGenius might actually be worth looking at if it should ever pass our way).