Folder Backup

Max, good to hear that you had a backup from which to be able to restore your computer after the crash.

In terms of backing up your data as often as possible, then it depends on what other options you have available to you?

With ATIH 2017 you could create a Non Stop Backup of your documents and scripts to an external drive, or alternatively you could use the Synchronisation feature to synchronise these folders to another computer, or if you have a subscription, to the Acronis Cloud.

For documents you also have other options using other Cloud products where changes are mirrored to the cloud in near to real-time.

With all backups, you need to ensure that you have multiple backup storage locations, i.e. not all on one drive which would be lost if the disk died.  Having an offline backup stored in a safe place is insurance against data loss from a variety of sources, such as fire, flood, electric storm surge, not to mention theft or malware, virus etc.

Thanks for your help!

How can I create a Non Stop Backup of my documents and scripts to an external drive? :O

I guess, thats, what I am looking for!!

Max, I would recommend reading about NSB in the ATIH 2017 User Guide.

See the following sections: Using Acronis Nonstop Backup  Acronis Nonstop Backup data storage  Nonstop Backup - Frequently asked questions  and  Scheduling

To create a NSB, open the main ATIH 2017 GUI and click on Add backup and give this a name.

Click on Source and select your documents and scripts folders to be protected.

Click on Destination and select where your NSB backup will be stored.  Note: NSB will use all available free space on the destination target, so if you need to restrict usage, create a separate partition or use a dedicated drive.

Click on Options and on the Schedule tab, select Non Stop Backup.

Click on Exclusions and select / deselect any items as needed.

Finally click on Back up now to start the NSB process.

Please be advised that NSB is not exactly what you think it is.

1) Microsoft Office files are not written to disk when they are open.  They are stored in memory (not on the drive) and occassionally written to the drive at set intervals (this can be changed in the Office applications to increase the autosave feature).  While they are in "memory" those changes won't be backed up.  

2) NSB does it's own consolidation each day at midnight (or as soon as you turn on the computer the next day if it's off at that time).  So, you essentially only end up with one version each day due to the consolidation method.  During that day, up til midnight, you might have those extra recovery points though.

I'd suggest you use an additional backup schedule with incrementals as well - just to be on the safe side.

Also, make sure you have Windows System protection enabled on any drive you are working with these files on (by default, it's only enabled on C: drive, but you should check to make sure it's actually on too).  These may offer another way to restore files to a specific point in time - Set it to about 10% of your available disk space.

Please take a look at this KB article:  https://kb.acronis.com/content/32417

About Nonstop backup

Acronis Nonstop Backup is a feature that provides continuous protection of disks and files, allowing you to recover from disaster both entire volumes and individual files and even their versions.

At first run Acronis Nonstop Backup will create an initial backup of the data (files, folders, drives or partitions) selected for protection. Note: this may lower the machine's performance. This full backup is done only once.

Then a special Continuous Data Protection (CDP) driver is turned on. This CDP driver reads all requests to the protected items and copies these to its data buffer. Every 5 minutes these requests (which constitute file changes) are flushed (i.e. saved) to the Acronis Nonstop Backup storage. Thus, one time slice is created, while the CDP driver keeps reading the requests.

Since all the files were backed up in their entirety during the first run, every 5 minutes Acronis Nonstop Backup only saves the file changes, not the files themselves. In other words, Acronis Nonstop Backup "compares" the modified state of the file to its latest version from the archive and captures the difference.

Note, that if Acronis Nonstop Backup protects a non-system partition and no changes have occurred for 5 minutes since the last backup, the next scheduled backup will be skipped. Acronis Nonstop Backup will wait for a significant data change and will create a new incremental backup only when such change has been detected. In those cases, the actual time interval will exceed 5 minutes.

In addition, if, for instance, you are working in Word and do not use the "Save" operation for an hour, changes in the Word document will not be backed up every five minutes, because Acronis True Image 2014 checks file changes on the disk and not in the memory.

thanks for your help!

i crated a non stop backup on a NTFS USB stick now...

is there any reason, why i cant mount that backup from the stick?

Another limitation of NSB. You can only view or restore directly from the GUI because of the unique backup method.

You also say USB stick... in assuming flash drive? Not ideal for a backup that is meant to run constantly as  it is reported to Windows as a removable device, will be unavailable when removed and cause your backup to error when it is removed and overall, flash drives have pretty bad write performance - even most goof ones, compared to even a spinning drive. Not all, but most. I wouldn't think a flash drive would be ideal for a NSB that is constantly looking to write to disk, but maybe it will be ok. Is your data ok to leave to maybe?