Over a span of probably 3 decades I tried a lot of solutions, Acronis, Iomei, Paragon, Macrium.

Reliability is the most important thing.
But reliability is NOT what a software promises.
The WORK ETHICS behind a company decides, if it was created and really tested under all imaginable bad circumstances. Forget all these sunshine promises - when your system does no longer boot, or your HD is encrypted? Sorry, too bad for you, the software was not intended for that very, very, very special case - and of course - no "review" had ever mentioned it...

Just like they sell you external HDs with hardware encryption - without mentioning, that if you need to access the data in pre boot, you might be screwed. Or if the HD-controller dies, that your data may be lost forever... But hey, it has 256-bit AES hardware encryption and you can feel really safe...

That means it must offer a proprietary boot-software, so that you have a compartmentalized restore system.
And then you are on extremely thin ice, if you are using Chinese or some less well established software:
You never know, if MS or the BIOS company changed anything in the meantime. Good luck with Iomei and other programs for sunshine days.

What is also important:
Not a shallow good first impression counts. Forget any promises. Test, how the software behaves under the worst circumstances possible!

Your computer is secured with Bitlocker? Updated the BIOS since making a system backup?
I had learend it the hard way and landed at Paragon.

But after Paragon was sold and its GUI was overhauled, it has become buggy mess, I knew I had to find an alternative.
Acronis: nothing had changed. It became an even worse American bloatware and resource hog. Once I had encountered a restore problem and the facts of being a bloatware did not restore trust.

So Macrium Reflect was the only remaining option.
And after more than 10 years, I can say that reliability is as good as the old Paragon, but with newest features.

For example it even allows to run full backups as a virtual machine.
I revcently opened a Live 7 project in WinXP (restored the old computer from a Paragon backup - created a Macrium backup - ran the backup in a VM).
I could save old plugin settings and exported a Kontakt 2 instrument. Live even plays back perfectly in that machine.

Or another amazing thing:
The new Asus notebook had Win11 on it. Made a Macrium backup of the old Acer notebook with Win 10.
And transferred the backup to the new hardware, activated the mechanism of Windows to ingore all drivers and let the amazing MS HAL (hardware abstraction layer) do its job...
Long story short: all software and +3000 plugins working flawlessly...
(well, except the need of a new registry key had popped up sometimes, obviously if the CP was triggered due to the changed hardware IDs).

 

Last edited: Nov 23, 2025 at 3:07 PM

I quite like Synchredible. Get a big old NAS and just back up your work drives to that now and then.
Don't sweat about it too much - if something is absolutely precious, then back it up immediately. But yeah - have a back up but don't spend your life going insane about it.

 

Yeah, don't be afraid if your backup software is unrealiable garbage and half your life's work might be lost forever...

 

windows 11 has a built in feature for doing backup copies. no third party needed.

 

Bottom line
Built-in Windows 11 backup tools are better than nothing and fine for casual users who:

• Use OneDrive anyway, or
• Just want to be able to reinstall Windows and their apps quickly

They are not "good" in the sense of being a robust, set-it-and-forget-it solution for protecting large amounts of personal data against drive failure, ransomware, theft, fire, etc.

Most power users and IT pros still recommend at least one third-party tool (Macrium Reflect Free, Veeam Agent Free, or even just good sync software like Synctoy/FreeFileSync) + external drive + cloud for critical stuff.

So yes, you can survive with only built-in tools… but I wouldn’t bet my family photos on it.

 

For your use case, backing up folders and data, I use a small but handy program called fast copy.

Fast Copy let's you very easily and reliably copy or sync data from one location to another. I use it half-yearly to backup all my music related data to an external backup drive. The sync (mode "newer" or "Size/Date") let's you very easily only sync files again that had been changed since the last backup. Therefore, the program will not copy all data every backup but only the files that had been changed since or are generally new. It will also look at the destiny folder and mirror it to the target location - you won't end up with duplicate files.

It's very easy to use - no nonsense! There is a also a good and helpful help section.