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VSS necessary?

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A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I was trawling through the forum and came upon the VSS subject. I only create full images twice a week to an external HDD. Is a choice of VSS or Acronis Snapshot necessary for my images (not on network), if not, can I choose No Snapshot and what effect would this have on my images, would they complete faster?. Currently it is set to VSS which I assume is the default, my SSD C: image is about 120gb and with validation completes in about 25-30 minutes.

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Peter,

VSS is used by True Image to make a snapshot of your full disk image then that snapshot is used to create the backup .tib file.  If you choose not to use the snapshot feature then the effect of this will be in usage of your PC while the backup completes.  If you have a convenient time of day where you need not use your computer for the necessary 25 or 30 minutes it takes to create the backup then you can run the backup at that time without using VSS.  Just remember that performance of your PC will suffer while performing other tasks without the use of a snapshot.

Your backups will not complete any faster by not using the VSS snapshot feature.

Thank you Enchantech, I shall leave well alone. When I make an image I shut down all running programmes and refrain from using my PC until TI has finished.Is this correct?

Peter, one of the purpose of using VSS or any other snapshot methods is to do exactly what it says and capture the state of the system at that particular point in time, so there should be no significant issues with continuing to use the computer while the backup is running.

Obviously any changes made to the computer after the snapshot is captured will not be included in the backup image, but in some ways, that is not a lot different to data open in MS applications that has not been written to the disk drive.

Thank you Steve for explaining everything in non-arcane language that even I can understand. Have you noticed that 'Notify me when new comments are posted' is not working?

Peter, I am still getting notifications for new comments but I did have to change to a different email address a few months back when this stopped working for me back then.

The most annoying feature of the notifications at present is the lack of any clickable links because all the text is sent as plain text.