True Image Home 2011 over built-in Windows 7 backup
Hello!
I have a new laptop with USB 3.0 ports and I've also bought a 500 GB USB 3.0 external HDD for backup. All I want to do is make an exact copy of my drive (two partitions, C & D, all system files, data etc. - in short: ALL) once or twice a month ond save it on my external HDD. If my HDD or something else in my laptop fails, I can replace the damaged hardware and restore my PC to exactly the same state that it was before. So: is the Windows 7 image backup enough for me or would I benefit from True Image (how exactly)?
Thank you!
I have Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, so that won't be a problem. By the way, I have the system restore turned off, could that be a problem? I'm new to imagigng/backup. So, which one is more reliable? Do I have to be idle while creating an image of my whole HDD with ATI/Win7? How do I then restore the image to a new (or formatted) HDD, is it easier to do it with ATI or Win7? I will only be doing a full HDD backup like once a month, so I will replace the old version of the image with the new one each time, no incremental backup needed (oh, what is differential backup?). I just want a reliable, fast, full HDD image backup. Size is not a problem, because my external HDD is the same size as my internal (500 GB). The main thing is that when my drive/laptop fails I can easily restore my whole HDD from the external drive to my new HDD - and that everyting works perfect and exactly as before. What do you think?
Anyone, please?
To restore your system, you need a system image. If you have a system image, you can safely turn off system restore (which works only in some cases of corruption).
You don't need to be idel while backing up. Backup software take a snapshot of your system state at the beginning of the backup. It is better not to run defragmentation software during backup. Run it just before the system image.
You have to store your image file(s) on a separate disk.
For both ATI and Win7, you have a recovery CD (one create by ATI, or the Win7 installation DVD). You can boot your computer on the recovery CD, access your backup and restore on your current disk or a new disk easily.
A full backup is what it is: the entire disk information is stored to enable a complete restore. An incremental backup runs after a full, and stores only what has changed since the last backup (full or incremental). It is much smaller, typically, than a full. When you have a chain of one full + X incrementals, you need the entire chain to restore to the last state. Differential backups are different. After the full, a new differential contains all the changes since the last full (and not since the last backup, like the incremental). So when you restore, you only need the last full and the last differential. Differential backups do accumulate all the changes.
ATI will backup faster than Win 7, and backups will be smaller. Both are very reliable.
Win 7 keeps older version of backups if you have activated system restore on the backup disk. The older copies are in the shadow copies. Since Win 7 manages the cleanup of the shadow copies, you don't control how long the older versions will be around. With ATI you can control.