Thank you Aomei for sending us a review code!

In 2019 we reviewed Aomei Backupper Professional 4.6.3 and found it to be intuitive and packed with many useful tools. This year we reviewed the latest version of Minitool Shadowmaker backup software and it has shifted to a monthly fee plan and I’m happy that Aomei Backupper Professional is cheaper and still has a one-time purchase price. A standalone copy of Shadowmaker sells for $79 with lifetime updates while Backupper Professional costs $49.95. Though the price went up since the last time we reviewed it, it’s less expensive than competing products.

Since I have multiple computers I duplicate the data I care about between them. I also use cloud backup storage for my documents, music, and company files. Unfortunately, I recently experienced a mechanical failure of one of my hard drives and lost all of the data that was on it. Other than my Thunderbird mail profile settings, I’m not sure what else was on that drive exactly. I should have done a better job of backing it up. Aomei Backupper Professional could have helped me if I created a backup image of the drive.

Upon launching Aomei Backupper Professional you’ll be prompted to create a New Backup or New Sync. If you choose to create a backup you can do a System Backup to create an image of your operating system partition. Disk Backup allows you to create an image file of your entire hard drive while Partition Backups allow you to create image files of individual partitions. If you just want to backup individual files or folders you can create a File Backup.

If you choose to synchronize your files you can do four different methods. Basic Sync will copy over the changed files from the source to destination. Real-Time Sync will copy over changes as they happen. Mirror Sync will make the source and destination directories match, and this included deletions! Two-Way Sync will match up the source and destination both ways. If you want to backup your data using an external drive, Syncing is the way to go.