If you’re serious about backing up your data and protecting your system, chances are you already use Arcserve ShadowProtect SPX as your go-to backup app. If you aren’t, you probably should be. The app creates and restores only one kind of backup—the kind that creates an image of a complete disk partition, not individual files. While other backup apps can create both image backups and file backups, and online backup services can create file backups in the cloud or on your disk, ShadowProtect SPX can restore a complete system after a hardware failure or a malware attack, and nothing matches the sense of security you get from a physical backup stored on a removable USB drive or network-attached storage. ShadowProtect SPX may only perform one kind of backup, but it's so reliable that it’s our Editors' Choice winner for backup software.
How Much Does ShadowProtect SPX Cost?
ShadowProtect SPX is available for a one-time purchase of $59.95. The purchase site still uses the name of ShadowProtect’s original vendor, StorageCraft, as do some of the app's windows, which is a bit confusing. ShadowProtect’s major rival is Acronis Cyber Protect, formerly called Acronis TrueImage. Acronis only offers subscription services starting at $44.99 per year for current students, with other options starting at $59.99 per year.
As mentioned earlier, ShadowProtect offers only image-based backups, and it runs only on Windows and Linux. Acronis Cyber Protect Home is available for more platforms, including macOS, iOS, and Android, and it offers image-based, file-based, and cloud-based backup on Acronis’s servers. Acronis’s backup software offers dozens of features ShadowProtect doesn’t even try to match.
From the list above, it might sound like Acronis is the better software. Over the years, however, I’ve had mixed experiences with Acronis’ products, including backups that didn’t restore and, once, a system that wouldn’t boot after I uninstalled an Acronis app. I had to do fairly extensive troubleshooting for this year's review of Acronis, as well. A backup app needs to work all the time, with no ifs, ands, or buts. ShadowProtect SPX does exactly that.
Similar Products
Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office
NTI Backup Now 6
Genie Timeline Home
Paragon Backup & Recovery 16
A Long History of Reliability
I’ve been using different versions of ShadowProtect for more than 15 years without a serious hiccup. That’s something I can’t say about its rivals. It’s rescued me from dozens of software and hardware mishaps. When you test software as often as I do, you inevitably come across apps that damage your files or your system. I've long since learned that ShadowProtect SPX can undo the damage quickly, reliably, and easily. Additionally, if you ever have bad enough luck to get zapped by ransomware, ShadowProtect SPX is the best way to recover your system without paying the bad guys. Simply boot up to the app’s emergency USB disk and tell it to wipe out your infected system and restore a healthy one.
ShadowProtect SPX works so reliably partly because it’s the consumer- and SOHO-level version of an extensive set of backup solutions designed for corporate and enterprise use. The same rock-solid technology that powers Arcserve’s high-end backup systems also powers the lower-priced consumer version—reviewed here. The downside of the app’s corporate-level heritage is a user interface that isn’t beginner-friendly.
What ShadowProtect SPX Does (and Doesn't) Do
As an image-based backup app, ShadowProtect SPX backs up an entire system or one or more disks instead of individual files. If you really care about your data, you’ll use both an image-based backup and a file-based backup method, as I'll explain.
As with other image-backup apps, you can either use ShadowProtect SPX backups to restore a whole system, or you can mount a backed-up image file with a drive letter so that it acts like an ordinary drive, and you can retrieve one or more files from the image and restore those files to your current system. You can also create incremental backups at regular intervals—intervals of minutes, hours, or days—so you can choose to restore a file from versions backed up at different times on the same day.
Other backup apps can create both image backups and file backups, and some online backup services create file backups in the cloud or on your disk. Sometimes, having a file-based backup system makes it easier to recover an earlier version of a document or to recover a file you wish you hadn't deleted. I use and recommend both iDrive, an Editors' Choice-winning service, and Dropbox for different kinds of file-based storage and syncing, and I use ShadowProtect SPX for recovering individual files from its backup images.
But ShadowProtect SPX is the only app I trust for restoring an entire system or an entire disk when something goes wrong. Its VirtualBoot feature lets me boot a backed-up image in a window on my desktop. This means if my hardware fails, I can launch my backed-up system on another machine and get my work done, even without restoring it. (See The Beginner's Guide to PC Backup for how to get started.)
One feature that you won’t find in ShadowProtect SPX is disk cloning. Other apps, including Acronis Cyber Protect, can clone a complete disk to another disk that you can use as a drop-in replacement if your current disk goes bad. ShadowProtect SPX doesn’t provide this feature, though its bootable recovery environment can format a new disk and restore backed-up partition images to the disk. If you need to clone a disk, there are plenty of free apps that do the job. I’ve used EaseUS ToDo Backup and AOMEI Backupper, and both get the job done, but you can find many alternatives.
Getting Started With ShadowProtect SPX
One minor warning: If you’re seriously tech-challenged and you don’t have enough confidence to click on a few menus to find the item you need, get someone’s help when you first install ShadowProtect SPX. This is a long-established app designed for both corporate and individual use. It uses a wizard interface for all operations, but you’ll need at least the minimal skills required to navigate to the drives or network shares you want to back up to and restore from. I’ll assume you have those skills for the rest of this review. If you don't have the skills or access to someone who can help you, you will probably be better off sticking solely to a cloud-based backup service like iDrive, as mentioned above.
It takes around two minutes to set up a backup plan with ShadowProtect SPX, and then you don’t have to think about it again until you need to restore a system, disk, or file. The app’s three-pane interface is informative to experienced users, but beginners will be glad to have the overlay image that appears when you first run the app to explain the essential features.
The first thing you’ll need to do is create one or more Destinations for your backups, meaning local and USB-connected disks or network shares where you want to store your backups. Then you create backup plans for each destination, setting the level of encryption you want for protecting your backup images, and creating a scheduling plan that lets you create or update your backups at intervals ranging from every 15 minutes to once a month, with options to back up only on certain days of the week. You can also create one-time backups which you only run when you choose.
You can create full backups, which create an image of an entire disk partition, or full backups followed by incremental backups, which back up only files changed since the last full backup. With the second option, when you need to restore from a backup, you can zero in on the date and time of the incremental backup you want to use. Other options let you fine-tune the backup strategy, telling the app to delete older generations of backups before creating new ones so that you don’t run out of disk space when saving to a local or USB drive. Also, I recommend selecting the option that sends you an email notification when a backup operation encounters problems.
I’ve never regretted going whole-hog with backups. I make weekly full backups to a network-attached storage drive and daily incremental backups to a second disk in my desktop PC. And when I’m going to be away from home, I make a full backup to a portable USB drive that I can take with me.
The only time you’ll need the SPX app’s interface is when creating a backup plan or looking at a timeline showing the history of your backups. You can also use the interface to restore a drive from a backup or to perform a Virtual Boot that launches your backup as a complete system inside a window. You don’t need the interface to perform these functions, however. You can also right-click on a ShadowProtect image file to open or boot it. If you want to check on the progress of a backup job, the app displays an accurate estimate of the time remaining and lets you view a detailed log.
How to Recover Anything With ShadowProtect SPX
ShadowProtect offers three ways to recover data from a backup image.
First, you can mount a backup image so it appears as a drive letter on your Windows system, and you then simply drag files or folders from the mounted image to any folder in your system. One useful option lets you mount the backup image as a writeable image, which lets you drag files into the image for use in the future. The actual image file isn’t changed, but the app creates a supplementary file that contains the files that will be added to the image the next time you mount it.
Second, you can use the app’s interface to restore any partition on your system other than the current boot partition. You won’t need to restart your machine before or after the restore. This method is useful for restoring non-booting drives you use for storing data. If you have a multi-boot system, you can use this method to restore one of your boot drives after you’ve booted into the other boot drive.
Third, you can boot from a USB drive or CD-R disk that contains the ShadowProtect Recovery Environment. This is a Linux-based bootable system you create from a download on the company's website. This is what you use when you need to restore your Windows system drive and other drives because your original machine won’t boot or when you want to transfer your system to a new machine—or to a virtual machine created by Windows or Vmware. You can choose a bare-metal restore option that does everything needed to restore your system to an empty disk.
If you’re restoring to a different hardware configuration from the one in the backed-up system, you’ll probably need to choose the option to perform a hardware-independent restore. This means the app will remove any hardware-specific drivers from the backup image when restoring it to a new machine so that when the restored system starts up, Windows will load the drivers needed by your new hardware.
Boot Up a Backup Image
ShadowProtect’s VirtualBoot feature—the feature that lets you boot up a backed-up system drive in a virtual machine—is a triumph of power and convenience. Before you use it, you must install one of the following: 1) the freeware VirtualBox, 2) Windows’ built-in but optional Hyper-V feature, or 3) VMware’s Vsphere hypervisor, typically used only in corporate settings.
If you want to use Windows’ Hyper-V, you must also download and install ShadowProtect’s Hyper-V plug-in. If you try to use VirtualBoot with Hyper-V and haven’t installed the ShadowProtect plug-in, you get an obscure message about an “unknown error,” so don’t say I didn’t warn you. I was able to use Hyper-V to boot up a backed-up image of my system disk in less than a minute. The app also includes an option that converts a backed-up image into a complete virtual machine that you can launch in Hyper-V or VMware.
To protect yourself from ransomware and other malware, you need to make backups on removable drives and detach those drives from your system after a backup is complete. Doing so prevents ransomware from encrypting them. If you’ve been smart enough to take these precautions, you have a good chance of recovering from even the worst ransomware attack. Here’s how to do it through ShadowProtect’s VirtualBoot feature.
If your system has been disabled by ransomware, the malware was probably lurking in your system before it fired up and encrypted your data. You don’t want to restore your system from a backup that has the ransomware lurking inside it, waiting to pounce again. So, to prevent this, find a clean system, run ShadowProtect SPX, and use the VirtualBoot feature to boot up a backed-up image.
Inside that image, run a malware-detection program to see if the ransomware payload is present. If the payload isn’t present in the backup, you can safely restore your system from that image. If it is present, you can try to remove it from the virtual-booted system, then make a backup image of the cleaned system and restore your actual hardware from that image.
If you can’t remove the payload, boot older backup images until you find a clean one and restore your system from that. Again, you need to keep some drives available with backup images on them, but if you value your data, you’re already doing exactly that with whatever backup software you use now.
ShadowProtect SPX Does One Job Extremely Well
On paper, Acronis Cyber Protect may look like the better backup choice because it's more flexible. Indeed, it is an excellent app. But what matters most in a backup app is reliability. I’ve never had a single problem with ShadowProtect. With Acronis, that's not the case. That said, Acronis performs many different tasks, and it usually does them all extremely well. If you need it for a task ShadowProtect doesn't perform, it's a good choice. ShadowProtect SPX Desktop does just one job—image backups—and does it perfectly. That makes it our Editors' Choice winner for backup apps.
Of the many backup solutions available for Windows, Arcseve ShadowProtect SPX is the most solid, mature, and reliable way to get a system up and running after a hardware failure, malware attack, or system malfunction.
Like What You're Reading?
Sign up for Lab Report to get the latest reviews and top product advice delivered right to your inbox.
This newsletter may contain advertising, deals, or affiliate links. Subscribing to a newsletter indicates your consent to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe from the newsletters at any time.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Sign up for other newsletters
