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Working on PC during image backup C-drive

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Frans, the answer to your question is 'it depends..'

If you are only doing simple activities such as browsing the net, looking at email etc, then there should be minimal risk of doing so when you are backing up the Windows drive.   Acronis use the Windows VSS (Volume Shadow Service) to capture a snapshot of the state of the system for the purpose of the backup.

It would not be recommended to perform any activities which could have a significant impact on the Windows drive, such as a full disk defragmentation, installing Windows Updates or large applications etc.

If you want to be 100% certain that you have an absolute perfect image of your Windows drive, then you can boot from the Acronis Rescue / Recovery Media and take an offline backup using that method, where it is guaranteed that you have no other activity to impact on the backup creation.  This is also a good method to test that your Rescue Media will work **before** you may need to use it for an actual recovery scenario.

 

There shouldn't be any problem for normal use. The backup is relatively CPU and disk intensive, so you might see a performance degradation. You can do software work and tweaks without issues.

The backup starts with doing a snapshot of the disk content. All disk I/O on the sectors to be backed up is put in a buffer while the data is backed up, then the buffer is written to these sectors. So, essentially, the data that is backed up is what was on the disk at the beginning of the back up.

Oh Steve, I saw your post after I reacted on Pat's.

I think I now have a good idea of what to do and what not during an image backup.

Frans