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Recommendation - 1st Time User

Thread needs solution

Plan:

User: Will be using a Dell Notebook with Windows 7 and possibly Windows 10 later. User will be using an external USB hard drive for backup/recovery.

What is the best backup/recovery solution for a user you who will be mobile much of the time with the external USB hard drive with attaching and re-attaching the USB drve. [Differential, incremental, Non-stop, etc.]

 

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Hello, ATIH 2016 will meet your needs and can perform all the backups that may be needed.  The choice of which backup scheme to use will depend on how much time your user will want to spend on creating backup images.

See Grover's True Image Guides (link in the left side column) for information on each of the backup schemes and how they work in reality.

The main gotcha with using an external USB hard drive is to ensure that it is always given the same drive letter each time it is disconnected and connected again.  If the user will be inserting USB flash drives then these can 'steal' the designated drive letter from the external hard drive, which will cause a backup to fail because it is pointing to the original drive letter where the drive was connected.

My own practice over years of travelling with a laptop was to create a separate partition on the internal hard drive and store backups on there, trusting that the internal drive wouldn't fail completely.  The important point here is to ensure that the bootable rescue media or Acronis Startup Recovery Manager (ASRM) can be used to both see and recover your backup image.  This should be tested before taking the laptop on the road!

Another alternative these days is to have one of the much larger USB memory sticks, now with sizes over 100GB and use this for external storage rather than carry an external hard drive.