In some ways Ashampoo reminds us strongly of Walgreens (or Sears for Canadians) in that most people will be thinking “Why should I pay full price when in the near future it will be HALF PRICE”. Though to be fair this is not a bad thing. It is a very, very good thing from us the consumer’s point of view. At $50 Ashampoo has a lot of competition. Yes, you get a lot – and we mean a lot – of bang for your hard-earned dollars… but it is not a slam dunk success. At half that it is.
Put simply Ashampoo is tailor-made for those wanting near Acronis level features but do not want Acronis level asking prices. Conversely, Ashampoo is also a very viable alternative to free software options. While there are indeed a veritable ton of free (as in beer) backup and imaging options out there for a mere $31 (25+6 for 2 years of support) you are getting tech support from an actual company. A company that will never snidely tell you to ‘RTFM’ like happens too often when the free open source program does something squirrelly.
Now with that said, Ashampoo Backup Pro 14 is not perfect. The largest weakness is in the backup compression it offers. Yes, you get plenty of options to choose from, but each of them is either going to slower than Acronis TI 2020, or result in larger backup file sizes… or sometimes even both. For example, the default compression algorithm is decent, and will not noticeably hog CPU resources, but the end result is noticeably larger than Acronis TI’s (equally low CPU overhead) compression option. For local storage this is a non-issue, but every GB counts when uploading to the Cloud. Even at its greatest file compression setting the results are still larger than Acronis’ best and CPU overhead may be a real issue for lower powered systems. This is part of the “10-20 percent” you are trading off against the lower asking price.
Helping to alleviate this issue is the fact that actually using Ashampoo Backup Pro is a lot more user-friendly. The User-interface, at times, is less than optimal in its flow and work path…. but this program goes out of its way to explain what each feature does. So much so even first-time backup and imaging software users will never have to guess at what a feature does… as they are all there in plain English. This is something we wish more imaging programs did.
Taken as a whole, version 14 may be a giant leap in the right direction but they are still not at parity with the 800lb gorilla of the market. Though with an asking price that is one half that of Acronis True Image 2020’s asking price is… that really is not that big a deal. About 90 percent of the abilities for 50 percent of the asking price is pretty much the epitome of value. So, while we would be more hesitant to pay full price… we would be equally hesitant to not pick it up during one of their near routine on-line sales. Keep an eye out and you may just get a pretty darn good imaging backup software solution at a rather good price.
The Review
Ashampoo Backup Pro 14
Put simply Ashampoo is tailor-made for those wanting near Acronis level features but do not want Acronis level asking prices. Conversely, Ashampoo is also a very viable alternative to free software options.
