foggypreacher Loc: Dickinson, Texas

Based on your review, I downloaded Macrium and will set it up shortly. Thank youi.

speedmaster Loc: Kendall, FL

Hope you like it! In the event of any issues with it I would gladly try to help.

Cheeers

Speed

grichie5

Thanks for the response and offer of help. So far I have made six or seven backups, my three hard drives, all in duplicate. I have scheduled a backup to commence at ten this morning and if this works, I will regard my change of back up software as final.
The Macrium program opens almost instantly when clicked on. The backup operation starts immediately when that icon is selected. Acronis still takes a minute or two before the program opens and there is a delay of two to five minutes before the back up starts after clicking. Since I have had issues with Acronis several times over the last few years, the waiting, while seeing no action on the screen does cause a bit of apprehension. In the meantime, I have gotten several responses from Acronis. In a few, they assure me that the beta will work until the new software is issued, and in others, I am told that my software is a trial that will expire in a few days. Now, no matter what happens one of their answers will be correct, but I will no longer care.
Stay safe!

speedmaster Loc: Kendall, FL

Great ! I used Acronis in the past and once I switched to Macrium never looked back. If you are using the free version you won't have their support but I never needed it. The only hiccup I had was with one Windows update that prevented the email status of the software run to be sent but they come up with the fix in a couple of days and it didn't prevent the backup to be made but only the completion confirmation to be sent.

Anyway, test some of your backups regularly restoring some files to a different location to check it they are working fine. I was doing it once a week restoring about 10 files from different directories but after sometime never having problems I decided to do it monthly only. Test the restore is a safety we should use with any backup software and an addiction I have since the time we used tape as storage media.

Cheers

Speed

speedmaster Loc: Kendall, FL

I forgot to ask you if you generated the emergency disk. It is important you do it using a pen drive (any 8 Gb pen drive will be ok) or a CD (is your computer boots from a CD). It is generated once only and it is used to restore any file or the whole system in case your OS can't boot. You always can access the backup file without it but you will need to go through the Windows and Macrium installation if you don't have it... if you have it is just a matter to boot from it and decide what to do, so don't skip its creation.

You can also run full, differential and incremental backups if you have very large HD's - although a full backup is always safer that many pieces to assembly when a problem happens. It is a matter of what is more appropriate in each case. I do not use at home but used it a lot when I was at work since we had a large data pool on the servers and workstations to backup.

grichie5

Thanks. I did buy the home version. I liked the idea of having ransomware protection for my backups.

I will try to restore a backup to a spare drive if it can be done.

Again, thanks for sharing.

I remember using tapes for backups years ago. I believe that was before the ability to make a disk image was possible.

Stay safe!


Richard

speedmaster Loc: Kendall, FL