Review: EaseUS Todo Backup is a Solid Choice to Migrate Your Data from Windows XP

Editor’s note: This is a sponsored review. Products featured in sponsored reviews are tested and reviewed with the same process as non-sponsored reviews and are not guaranteed to be positive.

It’s a fact of life that you’ll change computers, hard drives, or operating systems, and you’ll need to move your data to its new home. The same goes for a mobile phone, which gets changed even more often. Now, there are no shortage of options for getting this done.

If you buy a new drive, chances are it’ll come with its own data transfer software to allow for the transition. But in the case of restoring your mobile data to a replacement or a new device, or if you need to migrate your system to a new OS, you might want to give EaseUS Todo Backup a try.

We’ve written about EaseUS before, and they impressed us with their Mac Data Recovery tools. While we’re not feeling quite as much love this time around, we can say with confidence that EaseUS Todo Backup works well enough to recommend it in general. It gives users lots of options about backing up their data, and for those in need of a fast, reliable solution for getting out of Windows XP and onto Windows 7 or Windows 8, it’s definitely a good solution.

You can choose to back up your whole system, and save it to a second internal drive or an external drive, or you can select what files you want to preserve and which aren’t necessary. You can also set a timer for when the backups occur and where they’re saved, so if you’re the forgetful type, EaseUS will keep you covered.

Todo Backup also offers the option to save your Android phone’s data, though in my experience, this was something of a mixed bag—at least with my Nexus 5. To get the program to recognize your phone, you have to activate debug mode while connected via USB. This is as simple as hitting a single check box on some phones, but on the Nexus 5, it’s slightly more complicated, involving multiple taps, and requiring at least a few minutes of Internet sleuthing to figure out. And even after activating debug mode, I had to disconnect and to turn the mode on and off to get the program to recognize my phone.

Once the backup started, there were more than a few hiccups. The process seemed to inexplicably stall out for a long time at about 53 percent, though after about five or six minutes the process finally started to move again. After a full 22 minutes, my 12.55 GB phone data was backed up as an image file on my PC.

Despite these troubles, there’s still a lot to like about EaseUS Todo Backup. For no cost, the software offers all of the services I described, and it gets the job done. For $29, users can also get Outlook email backup and recovery, can create a Windows PE bootable disk, and enjoy free tech support. For $39, you can get the business edition and migrate systems to a virtual machine—a very useful feature for those who need to jump from the soon-to-be-defunct Windows XP to a newer OS.

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some aspects that didn’t rub me the right way. In addition to the tricky Android backup process, the user-interface on the whole feels a bit tricky to navigate. Clicking anywhere in the program prompts an “Initializing” pop-up, which can disrupt your flow as you search for files to schedule for backing up. Another issue that may cause some consternation is the fact that if you encounter a problem, EaseUS’s help pages are translated from Chinese, and not always particularly well translated.

And for users simply looking to back up their files, it really requires the use of a secondary drive with tons of free space on it. As an alternative, you could spend a few dollars a month to have your data continuously backed up to the cloud and simply access your account from a new machine or a replacement in the event of an emergency.

That said, those are relatively minor gripes, and considering that you get a full featured backup and migration tool for zero dollars, EaseUS Todo Backup is tough not to recommend to those who need to get out of Windows XP. And with Microsoft’s XP support cut-off looming, EaseUS Todo Backup should be near the top of your list for tools to help you get your migration done.