I usually test mines once a year by restoring a file. I used to do it more often but I have less time. I also do it by using the recovery software. This was when I had problems with acronis, the backup USb failed sometimes.Exactly. It's the restoration that counts. I use Acronis 2019 (I think) to backup my hard drive to an external drive. Only once I had to use Acronis to restore everything to a new drive after a full-on hard drive failure. It worked, happy to sayI use the free version of Paragon and it works well if you are just looking for the basics. Most importantly, I have successfully restored from an image on multiple occasions and with multiple PCs when upgrading traditional spinner hard drives to SSDs.
Periodically I need to move up in hard drive size and I use Acronis to clone everything to the larger drive. (Larger as in more space, not literal size, of course.) Then the old drive serves as a backup. When moving to a new computer (Windose 11 soon, I guess), I just use the old drive in a caddy to restore the mydocuments and other relevant folders and reinstall the usual software. Office, win7zip, browsers, on and on. I keep the old drive handy in case I forgot something. After a couple of years, it doesn't matter if I did. That's a pain but a fresh install is good. Then a new Acronis backup and all set.
I usually use image software not to restore data but to just reinstall a computer from scratch then use other backup software to restore data.
Statistics: Posted by gavinsiu — Wed Jan 29, 2025 9:53 pm — Replies 12 — Views 710