In the daily life, it’s inevitable to encounter such a situation that your system is crashed suddenly because of a hard drive failure, improper operations, virus attacks, accident power outage, etc. Therefore, it’s important to back up your system, files, and data in advance.
Speaking of the most useful and free backup software, MiniTool ShadowMaker would the first one that comes to my mind. I have used this software to back up my important data several times. It has many powerful features and can work very well.
About MiniTool ShadowMaker
MiniTool ShadowMaker is an all-in-one data protection and disaster recovery solution for PCs. It allows you to back up your systems, important files, folders, partitions, and even the whole disk. Once a disaster occurs, you are able to restore data with a copy of the backup.
When your computer fails to boot, MiniTool ShadowMaker also lets you create bootable media to restore your system to a normal state. It’s not a difficult issue to maintain hard drive by MiniTool Media Builder and MiniTool PXE Boot Tool.
And it is compatible with Windows 7/8/8.1/10 and Windows Servers. Additionally, if the remote computer is on the same LAN with your computer, you can even manage the remote computer.
The Features of MiniTool ShadowMaker
Backup: This feature enables you to back up files, folders, disks and partitions and even the operating system by default. MiniTool ShadowMaker is designed to back up the operating system. Therefore, if you don’t change it, it will automatically choose the system as the backup source.
Restore: Once the corresponding backups are created, you can recover our file, folder, partition, disk and the operating system to the normal state. For example, you can restore the computer to a normal state by using the system that you backed up before if the computer is crashed by accident.
Sync: This feature allows you to sync files or folders to other locations. At the same time, it can keep data safe. This feature can help you to transfer even the large files at high speed. After synchronizing, you can access the file directly without the restoring process like file backup.
Media Builder: This feature enables you to create the bootable media that can help you to boot the computer to enter the MiniTool Recovery Environment when the operating system couldn’t boot normally.
Add Boot Menu: Except for the bootable media feature, MiniTool ShadowMaker provides you another easier way – Add Boot Menu to enter MiniTool Recovery Environment. The PC will enter Windows PE and allow performing some recovery solutions without bootable media.
Clone Disk: If you want to upgrade our disk to a larger one, this feature can help you to clone the OS from HDD to the SSD without bringing any damage to the original data. It also allows you to clone the dynamic disk but it only supports simple volume.
Universal Restore: The computer may fail to boot when you try to restore the system to different hardware or a different computer since it’s incompatible with this system. At the same time, the Universal Restore feature not only enables you to install and update drivers but also fixes the incompatibility problem.
How to Use MiniTool ShadowMaker to Back Up System
Here are steps of backing up our system:
Step 1: Decide a Backup Mode
Launch MiniTool ShadowMaker and continue to use the trial edition by pressing Keep Trial. Then choose the local computer to continue by clicking the left Connect button.
Step 2: Choose Backup Source
Go to the Backup page. This software selects the system partition and system reserved partition by default.
Step 3: Choose a destination path to store your disk image.
Go to the following interface and choose one partition to store your system image based on your needs and click OK.
Step 4: Start to back up
Go back to the following interface and click Back up Now to start the process immediately.
Till now you have backed up your system successfully.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the all-in-one software – MiniTool ShadowMaker is a free, great, powerful tool with so many powerful features to keep data and PC safe in different ways and it won’t cost you much time.