Ashampoo Backup Pro 26 review: Easy, effective PC backup

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Despite the oddball corporate moniker, Ashampoo makes some very effective software. Not the least of which is Backup Pro 26. For the average home user, it’s a friendly and solid backup solution. However, it’s missing a couple of features that would make it truly “pro.”

What are Ashampoo Backup Pro 26’s features?

If there’s a backup task or methodology, Backup Pro 26 generally offers a user-friendly implementation of it. Imaging of entire partitions and drives, backup of files and folders, real-time backup, incremental (not differential) backup, and disaster recovery — including boot media.

Note that the real-time backup was so laggy in my testing (up to a couple of minutes), that I asked if it’s actually continuous. Real time means that any file change instantly invokes a backup, which is how Ashampoo describes it, while continuous is simply very granular (a couple of minutes or so) scheduled backup. I had not received an answer as of the time of this writing.

Backup Pro 26 steps you through creating backup plans, with both simple (Easy Backup) and more comprehensive (Wizard) options, the latter featuring tons of options compartmentalized to single pages. Options such as very granular scheduling, the number of backups to keep, notifications, compression, encryption, etc. Why the confusing naming, I can’t tell you — both options step you through the process. Think of the two as “Basic” and “Granular.”

Jon L. Jacobi

The clarity of baby steps in the Wizard option makes the process a bit more fool-proof for new users. Pros might prefer fewer steps and more options per page. But both wizards spell out the steps nicely in plain language. Kudos for that.

Though the interface overall is very friendly, it can be tedious in spots. For instance, manual file selection requires clicking through two dialogs rather than one. I’m being picky, and as I said before, the average user will spend a lot more time running backups than defining them.

Backup Pro uses the common .vmdk format as its backup container, which can easily be attached to VMWare or VirtualBox virtual machines. However, this is only if you don’t encrypt them (you can compress). Otherwise you must use Backup Pro to restore files. The same goes for encrypted, and/or compressed file/folder backups.

Unencrypted, uncompressed file/folder backups may be browsed using nothing but Windows Explorer. Backup Pro can mount any of the image files it creates for browsing as well as browse compressed or encrypted file/folder backups. Versioning is supported, so you can also go back in time to previous iterations of files. Nice.

Jon L. Jacobi

While Backup Pro will create a rescue USB stick or CD/DVD, the usual option to create a ISO image is missing. This won’t affect many users, but it forced me to create my own using Rufus for grabbing screen shots inside a virtual machine. Yes, woe is me.

Additionally, the rescue disk is restore-only — i.e., there’s no facility for creating new backups. Most users won’t care, but I have on many occasions found it necessary to create a backup of a failed installation before trying to repair it, and that requires backup software on an external boot disc.

Note that even if your subscription (see the pricing section below) expires, the rescue disc can still restore backups.

Backup Pro handily supports cloud destinations, including OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Google Drive, Dropbox, Strato HiDrive, 1&1, MagentCLOUD, OwnCloud, nextCloud, as well as any WebDAV server. Some of those might be unfamiliar, which reflects the European roots of the program.

Conspicuously missing from the cloud destinations are Amazon S3 and S3 compatibles, which often offer the best value. To utilize these with any backup software, use one of the utilities in our roundup of cloud managers.

Jon L. Jacobi

One thing I did not particularly care for with Ashampoo was its somewhat confusing presentation of partitions and disks when defining a full system backup. There is a note saying pertinent hidden and system partitions will also be backed up when you select any partition on a bootable disk. A good thing, as a full system restore absolutely requires these.