At last! New Hasleo Backup Suite Free gives Windows users the protection their data -- and system -- needs

Looking for a way to protect your PC from the dreaded specter of data loss or system corruption? The most effective strategy involves backing up both data and your Windows system, and the best free tool for the job is Hasleo Backup Suite 5.2 Free.

Windows’ own backup tools aren’t really fit for purpose, while our previous backup tool of choice -- Macrium Reflect -- dropped its free tier a few years ago. That was forgivable, but we draw the line at switching to a subscription model. Thankfully, Hasleo Backup Suite offers a comprehensive -- and completely free -- alternative.

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Despite the somewhat rustic user interface, Hasleo does everything Reflect did -- and more. After launching, click Backup to reveal it has all your needs covered: a System Backup automatically selects all the partitions required -- including your Windows drive of course -- to restore Windows to a fully working state. You’ll also see options to back up your choice of partition(s) or disk(s), plus a File Backup option for covering your data backup needs.

Each option runs you through a wizard -- you can back up to any internal, external or network drives that are visible in Windows, back up to a schedule and help maximize backups while minimizing space by combining full, differential and incremental backups to ensure you have a range of recovery options to choose from.

Backups can be compressed, encrypted and -- crucially -- automatically verified on completion. Once taken, you can both restore and browse backups by mounting them as a virtual drive (perfect when you simply want to recover a single folder or file). Running out of backup space? You can also delete and merge images to consolidate your backups.

Hasleo Backup Suite can also be used to clone systems, partitions and drives when upgrading disks, plus offers an emergency disk creation tool to allow you to use (and restore) backups from outside Windows.

The program is also under active development to expand its capabilities and improve performance. Version 5.2 has just been released with no new features, but several notable improvements that make it a must-have upgrade for current users.

These tweaks include a new slider allowing users to change the priority of the backup process. Disk backup images can now be mounted in writable mode, and the monthly backup schedule now allows users to specify a month.

Users can now change the compression level of backup tasks created in v5.0 of the program, and the notification area can display the backup progress (hover the mouse over the icon) plus be used to quickly cancel the backup task as well as show or hide program windows.

Partitions can now be automatically extended during disk layout on larger target drives, and the new version ends with the usual unspecified bug fixes and feature improvements.

Hasleo Backup Suite 5.2 Free is available now as a freeware download for any PC running Windows Vista or later.