Yes, doing backups is good.
The Free version is the SAME as their paid commercial version, (for home use only).
It has lots of features including automatic backups.
A picture of it:
View attachment 23204
The point of my post was to provide a good free way to backup.
Hi there
This program actually has some severe limitations -- like you can't restore to a smaller partition etc. I'm often messing around and re-arranging partitions on Disks.
he NO NO of using this though is that it uses VSS - That is a 100% no no as this will need you to have space on the drive equivalent to what you are restoring before it will work or th VSS (Volume shadowing service) will fail.
Also can't write directly to DVD's / CD's / Tape cassettes -- sometimes it's quite good to be able to write to these. - Also doesn't "Multi Volume" - so if the target backup device is full it won't write to the new volume or even request a new one to be mounted (DVD / Tape).
The Bootable version also doesn't handle my Windows "Spanned Volumes" -- I have several volumes "Spanned" so windows sees it as a SINGLE volume. Acronis works fine with this. Screenshot below -- here I have TWO physical volumes spanned as a SINGLE DRIVE so windows thinks it's an approx. 4TB single drive. This is on my server and I backup the clients to this "Spanned Volume" with no problems.
I'm going I hope to upgrade to W2012 Server and use Storage pools later -- Acronis will also handle this too.
Too many limitations IMO compared with Acronis or Free Macrium.
(Using Spanned volumes means you can have files stored in Large directories - and is especially good when you have say music programs that can't handle music data bases that are larger than a physical drive - for instance say you have 3 * 250 GB drives and you have 500 GB of music - when spanning the drives as a single 750 GB drive means the music fits on it EASILY.
If you lose one volume in the spanned set you lose the lot so it *could* be risky -- I'm switching to Storage pools as soon as I get my 2012 server installed. However since I'm backing up DATA to the spanned volume and have copies of data elsewhere the risk of losing data of one of the spanned volumes breaks is not very large.
What happens is overnight Computer data from Client machines is Dumped to the server -- then individual directories are copied from the server to external disks at various periods later in the week so nothing is lost even if the server were to fail.
Cheers
jimbo