Software for Backup to External Hard Drive

I use Acronis. I found it on sale for $30 with $30 in rebates, so it was a "no-brainer". Version 11 allows you to make a recovery thumb drive as well as recovery CDs. That's nice for certain laptops and netbooks. Not so important for desktops. I have friend who use Easeus ToDo, but I don't think it compresses like Acronis does. Paragon is a good choice also. Acronis has most features. Allows you to "mount" your data image and recover individual files. Suppose you have a doc, spreadsheet or picture file you have made recent changes to but want to go back to the original. You can go an image from the past and recover that original file. Best to keep at least three copies of your files. One on the computer, one on a separate medium and a third copy that is offsite - like cloud storage or a hard drive in a safe deposit box. Also, don't keep your external drive next to your PC. A thief will take the PC and the drive at same time!

I've been busy printing and reading all the links.

I'm not a heavy data user and prefer to control my backups, not have it be automatic.
Please see if this sounds reasonable:

Use Macrium to make a Rescue CD.
Use Macrium to make System images to Western Digital My Book Elite External Hard Drive periodically.
Use Windows Explorer to drag and drop data files to " " " as needed

All comments are welcome.
Thanks, cb

whs said:

Use anything suggested above (Acronis, Macrium, Paragon) but NOT the built in Windows imaging. It has no function, you never know what it does and gives you nothing but headaches. There are some experts that seem to get along with it, but they are far and apart.

The comment in bold in simply incorrect.
I have made 20+ images with the inbuilt Windows imaging and restored 10+ systems.
I have also restored the image direct to two brand new (out of the bag) HDDs.
I have never had the slightest problem.

But I do use Macrium Reflect (free) as a secondary safeguard. It also has some definite additional flexibility in choosing specific partitions. With Macrium you need to know when to replace the MBR and when to image and restore the system reserved (100MB) partition if you have one. Windows does this job automatically.

They can all let you down and you will only have some true level of confidence when you do your first successful full system reimage.

I did a Windows image the first hour I got this new Dell with Win7. Being a totally new machine for me I was afraid of corrupting the system with my inexpierence and curiosity. It happened in short order and luckily I restored the image back to when it was new out of the box a few times. Dell doesn't have a built in recovery in their line of Latitudes. I found Windows imageing was working for me but then I hit a point once were I had to use the bootup disc and that didn't work. Lucky for me I had cloned a spare hard drive a week before and used that to move on. Anyway because of that failure to bootup to restore I now just clone 3 extra HDD's I have.Cloneing has never let me down and Simple enough to do. I can't see the use of imageing for me and after reading the above post on how they can let you down it strengthens my resolve to just clone away. I would assume that for some people imageing just won't cut it.