Shofkom's World of Information Technology

First let me state for the record that I am in no way affiliated with, or receive any monetary compensation for the following review.

That out of the way, I wanted to let you guys know about an incredible piece of software that has saved me HOURS, even DAYS of time in the restoration and recreation of system images.  The product is EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5.  I’m currently working with a group of software testers whose job it is to test code on all different “target” machines with different software and hardware configurations.

What this software does is allow you to backup and restore EVERY computer in your environment including physical and virtual machines, regardless of OS.  (Note: As of this writing I have only tested out Microsoft Windows based system images, and will likely write up a second report when I have had the chance to test on Linux based machines.) It performs all the traditional backup methods (Full, Incremental, Differential, etc.) and can send these backups to network shares, removable drives, off site ftp’s, etc.  You can set up schedules and lock down times for backups just like most other backup suites and has messaging capability built in to email you alerts for the success and failure of said backups.  However, I want to use this review to highlight what this software can do that others can’t.

The advantages this software has over the others are the following:

1. The ability to convert a backup image into a .vmdk file for direct mounting to a VM in any of the ESX product lines.  (This does require the installation of a tool from VMware that you can download from here).  In my testing of the product I was not able to get the VM to boot directly from a single converted image, but it worked flawlessly when simply attaching a converted image to an existing VM.  For recovering a physical machine to a virtual machine I simply created the VM, attached the EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 Boot .iso (The BOOT disc is a Windows PE Environment that will work with sysprep and contains the FULL Version of the software with the UNIVERSAL RESTORE.) to the VM and then pointed it to the image without even converting it and it worked like a dream.  I have tested both physical to virtual and virtual to physical and the software performed flawlessly.
2. The ability to “mount” an image to get a single file or folder.  The ability to do a UNIVERSAL RESTORE or HARDWARE INDEPENDENT RESTORE where you can do a sector by sector backup of a system and recover it to a completely different system with completely different hardware.  I have tested this with ALL versions of W2K3 and W2K8 (32/64 as well as R2/non R2) and it worked flawlessly every time.  I have moved and recovered system images not only to different DELL hardware, but also cross platform moving a system image from a DELL server to an HP server, to an IBM server, and all worked flawlessly.  The software appears to do complete system prep and will ask you for any drivers that it can’t find during the initial boot up.  In the 12 test cases I have tried, only once did it ask me for a driver, and I was able to find it via the support.dell.com website.  You will have to reactivate windows and so far as I can tell has not given me any SID problems.  Please see these blog posts on changing SIDS as well as using SID changing software before you attempt to change SIDS in windows: REFERENCE 1 – REFERENCE 2 – REFERENCE 3
3. The ability to create a system image from within the Windows GUI without having to use a Boot Disk or even reboot the server.  Again, this is especially convening when you are doing work remotely and can’t be there to physically insert a disk into the servers CD tray.  You can download this software, install it and perform the backup without having to boot the system via bios or use any iDrac features.

The only product I have seen that is comparable to this one is made by Acronis, but the license fees are much, much higher.  Acronis wants around $1200 to protect a single server while EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 only charges around $600 for 10 licenses.  (I do not know what protection scheme Acronis uses but it appears that the EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 licensing is completely on the honor system as I have never entered a single key since paying for and downloading the software.)

The only drawback I can see for using this software is that EASEUS is not an American company, so I do not know how difficult getting support would be.  However, I have not had to use any support or even open a single trouble ticket as the software just WORKS!  Also, the user manuals are very well written, with easy to follow instructions, and the software itself is very user friendly.  Grab the trial from here: and test it out yourself.  (The only thing you can’t do from the trial is the universal restore.)

So again, if you’re looking for backup software that is both affordable and works I would highly recommend you grab a copy of EaseUS® Todo Backup Technician 2.5 and implement it in your IT environment.  If you would like me to show you how to implement this software into your existing infrastructure, or replace your old Ghost or Backup Exec suite just hit me up on the contact form located here!