Hard to explain but here goes.
When I am backing up my hard drive, I am aware that things are coming in - antivirus program updates and others.
How does this affect restore if I find it necessary?
Thought it would be better to ask now rather than when I really need it.
Thanks for reading and I appreciate any comments.
Hey Joe,
As long as it doesn't restart the computer or explorer, it shouldn't be an issue. They just won't be included in the backup in progress. :)
I can only speak about Macrium imaging. When it make an image it takes a snapshot of the state of the system at that moment and will restore it just like that. I suspect other 3rd party imaging programs do the same, I don't know how the w7 backup works.
Hi guys, I don't know what happened here but I thought I thanked both of you but I don't see it here so here it comes.
Thank you very much for your responses. I feel much better now.
Backup programs that use the Volume Shadow Copy Service are safe to the extent all the running programs implement the shadow protocol correctly, which requires them to make whatever files they have open logically consistent so that you can later restore and use them in the state they were in at the time of the backup. I'm overly pessimistic about things like this and always do images outside of Windows; FWIW, the program I use is Terabyte's Image for Linux, but there are others.
For ordinary file-based backups, I use SyncBackSE, which runs inside of Windows. I can't use VSS on my non-system discs as I TrueCrypt everything, and VSS isn't supported on volumes outside the scope of system encryption, so I configure SyncBackSE to shut down programs that hold files open continuously.
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