What's the Best Anti-virus?

I've been running with Acronis True Image 2010 still not having gotten the latest version and that still compresses the full system image backups down in smaller size then seen with the Windows built in option. The images are kept on a separate drive.

zapp22 said:

Repeating myself ad nauseum: there is no "AV" suite that will protect you, period.
infections these days are not "V" for starters - those monikers are retained because the bulk of the remaining market for such are technically illiterate and have been using "AV" forever because marketing agreements with vendors put that junk on everything that shipped [along with a lot of other junkware, grayware, spamware]

Backup is easy.
Restore is hard.
If all you're doing is "backing up" - copy/paste is quick.
For real restoration, the one I use exclusively is Paragon B&R [i.e. "2014"]. Not user friendly. Not "consumer" product IMHO, but it works like voodoo. RESTORES to the drive precisely as it was archived. boots right up.

Just my opinion, I find restore easy as well as back up. I use Macrium reflect image backup & restore though. I also use MSE (Microsoft Security essentials), and I use spybot S&D old version. To date, I haven't got a virus, spyware or malware.

With Acronis T.I. you have two main options when going to create a full image backup. !) Quick and Easy to save on drive space 2) Sector by Sector which will include the boot sector as well as unused partition space to restore the drive the way it is not simply unpack everything simply wrapped up in an image file. That does take up some space however for a 528gb image from a 1tb OS drive! Other quick images were running at about 275gb or so being compressed much further.

With multiple storage drives and regular copy and paste manual backups I could simply nuke the host drive and toss on the clean install at any time. From there each program would also see a fresh install go on until getting things back to an approximate but never 100% exact match for the way things had been. Any fragmented files that could be defragged would then be free of fragmentation as well as running a much faster defrag to followup on the clean install of everything.

As far as prepackaged bugwares that is limited to OEM premade not custom builds. And therer are usually ways and means to see factory "Bloatwares" as the descriptions go gone forever! With a little effort even OEM built can still be free of all that crud!

One thing I looked at when first getting the present system together was backing up the backup drive with a second main storage drive to compliment the first. Initially system images both Acronis and The W7 backups went there as well as the second partition on the second OS drive since that could be used for testing the quality of the images made to insure the integrity.

Now add another external into the formula to store even a few more images into the mix. Since the external is switched off when not in use unlike the spare internals it never is exposed to any of the downloads. It also doesn't see the wear and tear either and less likely to go suddenly. That's not to say the drive couldn't simply belly up the next time I go to use it. But while it can back up a degree of what is on the internals the internals can back it up at the same time. The rest duplicated across the two internals serves to back each other up.

The key feature as far as the av is concerned is not the ability to locate and remove all bugs but the web filtering portion of the firewall the software offers to prevent things from getting on by being a little overprotective upon going to look at any new site.