Ashampoo Backup Pro 15 Review & Giveaway

Ashampoo Backup Pro 15

Winners Announced!

Ashampoo has graciously offered our DCT readers a chance to win one of five licenses for their new Backup Pro 15 software. At the time of writing these licenses are normally valued at $49.99 (US) but are currently discounted to $29.99. If you enter our contest, you might just win a copy for free!

“Ashampoo® Backup Pro 15 takes the fear out of viruses, ransomware, or hardware issues! Experience an easy to use well-designed but powerful backup solution. The new Ashampoo® Backup Pro 15 offers you all possible storage options: Back up single files to entire partitions to local drives or online storage providers. In addition, the program is light on resources, gets out of your way and does all the heavy lifting in the background. Naturally, it can also restore your backups. Ashampoo® Backup Pro 15 even comes with a bootable rescue system to restore your system in the event of major system failure!” ~ Ashampoo

Installation

As with all Ashampoo products, installation is a straightforward process with no unexpected bloatware to accompany it. It does add an Ashampoo Deals icon to your desktop but that can easily be deleted if you are not interested.

System Requirements

• Operating SystemWindows® 10, Windows® 8, Windows® 7
• Computer: Any computer that supports the above operating systems
• Other: An Internet connection is required to activate the program. The program license is verified repeatedly at regular intervals
• Full administrative rights are required to use the program

Features

• Well laid out user interface with all important information
• Single-click access to all important menus
• Presets for ready-to-use backup plans
• Handy backup plan overview
• Detailed information on each backup
• Up-to-date cloud support
• Extensive online help and printable PDFs
• Better stability, flexibility, and performance

Ease Of Use

I can’t resist a good backup program so decided to run this one through its paces. As mentioned before, installation was a fast and painless process.

Opening Screen

Clicking on the “hamburger” menu at the top left corner will open a sidebar explaining what all those icons mean. Let’s dive in and create a Backup Plan.

Creating A Backup Plan

Creating a backup plan involves several steps to complete and that is due to the flexibility of this software. You can choose from several different types of media such as an internal/external drive all the way to the Cloud if you like:

To keep it simple, I simply chose a local drive.

In subsequent windows, you will be asked for a backup name, whether you would like it to be encrypted, and/or compressed, or run on a schedule. Backup Pro will also offer you the choice of a couple of predefined templates or you can define your own setup:

If you choose to define your own, then you can fine-tune all the settings to suit your personal needs. You can choose to back up an entire disk, a partition, or individual files. I ran a full backup of my Windows system disk. I also told Backup Pro to validate the backup upon completion. Here’s a shot of the backup in progress:

About 10 minutes into the backup, I decided to see how much of a hit my system would suffer if I opened up a browser to surf around a bit. This is when I discovered that Backup Pro paused its work. This meant that as long as I was doing something else, there was no backup progress being made. Well, that’s unacceptable, I thought. Then I discovered that there was a setting for this:

It really pays to check the settings before you use a program for the first time. Had I noticed this, I would have disabled this behavior immediately. C’est la vie…

Backup Completed And Report

Here is a report showing the particulars of this backup session:

This report is opened up in your browser and it shows a lot of interesting information including the compression results and the amount of time it took. The compression result seems a bit misleading. Yes, the drive is about 150GB in size and yes, the compressed backup file is about 25% of that. What it doesn’t show is that the original size of the combined files on that disk is about 51.5GB. That means the actual compression was closer to 50%. There is nothing wrong with this. In my experience, the backup programs I have used in the past have all achieved this compression rate, so this is acceptable.

The time it took seemed a bit long to me. 25 minutes for this size of a backup is more time than I am used to. Then again, if I had turned off that Automatic Pause in the first place, it wouldn’t have mattered to me.

Final Thoughts 👍

Ashampoo has produced a fine backup solution that is easy to use and is very flexible. Being able to create backups to the Cloud seems like a big plus! The ability to encrypt along with a reasonably high compression rate are also welcome positives.

I would not hesitate to recommend this software. It does what it says it will do.

How To Enter The Contest

We’d appreciate it if you’d take a moment and submit a comment telling us why you’d like to win Ashampoo Backup Pro 15. However, submitting a comment is not required to enter this contest and will have no bearing on your chances.

For your chance to win, simply enter your name and a valid email address in the spaces provided below. After your entry is accepted you will be presented with options to visit/follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and/or YouTube. By doing so, you will get more entries, increasing your chances of winning this giveaway contest.

Sharing the contest on social media is completely voluntary, but is encouraged.

Competition Rules:

• To enter, simply submit your name and a Valid email address. Your address will not be shared outside of this site
  
• You must submit a VALID email address. We need to contact the Winner, so disposable email addresses will not be eligible
• Additional entries may be earned by voluntarily sharing on Facebook, Instagram, and/or Twitter, or by visiting our YouTube page
  
• Shortly after the contest ends, the winner(s) will be chosen at random
• Winner(s) names will be posted on this giveaway page. Please check back here to see the winner(s) name announcement!
• The winner(s) will be notified by email at the email address used to enter the contest – be sure to use a valid email address that you check regularly
• Winner(s) must claim their license within five (5) days. After the five (5) day period, unclaimed prizes will be distributed at DCT’s sole discretion
• Entrants agree to allow DCT to communicate with them via email using the address provided by the entrant when entering the contest

Good luck to everyone!!

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