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Can Computer Be Used While Backing Up?

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Intel Pentium 4 HT
Win XP Pro

Can one use their computer Acronis is backing up? Can it make a reliable backup while other things are running?

This is a seven year old computer with a Pentium 4. No dual or quad core here. It's is an HT CPU but I don't think that hyperthreading even works.

The backup alone seems to mostly be pinning my CPU usage at 100%, but I want to try to get as many other things running simultaneously as I can until the computer gets too unbearably slow to continue. I am a power user and multimedia multitask on top of office and business apps as much as possible until the computer comes to a crawl, then I back off.

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Yes. ATI essentially takes a snapshot of the system at a point in time, then backs it up. You may find that other tasks run more slowly than usual while the backup is occurring, but it's safe to continue to work during the backup.

You can but you may not wish to. You'll probably find that it makes more sense to backup when you're not using the machine simply because backing up takes so much resources, especially in the file system. If you have to be there, find something else to do, otherwsie backup up with a task and go do something that won't hold you in "slow motion". Even if you have the program set to backup at low system resource use priority, nonetheless it's going to need a lot of the file system's time, especially if you are backup up from on to one of the disk you are going to be using while backing up, and that tends to be the traffic choke on the data train.