Which is the best free backup program?

TBH - I am currently using Paragon Drive Backup 10 Server.

As for the free versions - the functions on the Paragon are amazing.

You can make Macrium go faster - by increasing it's priority ( and cpu usage , of course).

Overall the free Paragon offers a lot more - after the first full image - you can do Differentials - I haven't seen that before on a freebie. You can make an image from the boot disc too - which may be important.

SIW2 said:

It obviously wasn't working well for Fy.

Drive Backup and Recovery is a great app. - and you can't beat the price .

To the contrary Acronis 10 was working VERY WELL for me as I have been using it for 3 months with the Win7 RC. However, when I installed the final version of Win7 and installed Acronis 10 it triggered a Win7 compatibility block error message, "Acronis 10 is not compatible with this version of windows. At the moment, the following Acronis products support Windows 7:
* Acronis True Image Home 2010"

FyrmnJ

I had high hopes for the inbuilt backup utility that comes with Windows 7. For the first time it seemed to actually have all the features I needed and I was looking forward to being able to roll back to previous versions etc all intergrated with the OS.

Only problem is that it appears they didn't even test it once before releasing it. If they had done they would have realised that it's so slow it's completely unusable for anyone with more than about 20GB of data. I set it up to run this afternoon and could have done 2 Cobian backups in the time its taken windows backup to get up to just 30%. A quick google search reveals people moaning about it taking DAYS to do the initial backup. Shame on you Microsoft, what was the point in releasing it in it's current form?

Back to a 3rd party backup utility I go...again....

I am afraid that is because it uses vhd as the format. Not much compression either.

Still, it's better than nothing - many will never have heard of a System Image - but will do it when prompted - might save them some way down the line.

An experienced user will probably want something more flexible and with more options.

You can't blame MS - they are not trying to outdo the specialists in this area.

Just like they are not trying to replace Photoshop by including Paint.

No doubt I'm just not understanding things correctly, but...

I read somewhere that Macrium copies everything and overwrites partitions and makes its own partitions so I am afraid to use it to put an image of Vista on my separate D drive which has my files (once I make a partition there).

I currently have Vista on C and would like to install upgrade of Windows 7 on C, then put image of Vista on the separate D drive, assuming, of course, that it won't overwrite all my files on D.

HI Oldroser,

You wil find that all disk imaging programs operate in a similar fashion.

When you create an image - it is save as a compressed file .

You can save that like any other file - put it where you have space. It will not overwrite the partition.

When you restore an image - it will overwrite the partition you are restoring it to - replacing it with the contents of the image.

That is what they all do.