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How is Windows 10 (64 bit home edition) working with Acronis for you guys? :)

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Hi guys and apologies if this question was already answered elsewhere, I tried searching on the forum and google without much luck but then again my search skills suck :P 

Windows 10 (in my case 64 bit home edition) is kind of a strange new beast for me with this whole Microsoft Account thing they require you to have... I'm not sure what effect, if any, that has on Acronis.

I'm wondering if anyone using the 2019 or 2018 (or even 2017 or 2016) version of Acronis has used Acronis to restore an image of their "C" (Windows) hard drive back to their hard drive - and if so how well it worked out for you?   Trying to decide if I want to buy Acronis for my Windows 10 installs

One thing I should point out - currently have my computer dual booting between Windows 10 and Windows 8 .. while in theory I guess I could use my Win 8 install of Acronis to back up my Win 10 install, I'm thinking it might be safer to just purchase new licenses of Acronis for the Win 10 install even though it's all technically on the same computer, just two different SSD drives, one for Win 8 and one for Win 10 ... also I keep my Acronis backups on a different, 1 TB, sata (non SSD ) hard drive - does anyone think there would be any problems having both Win 8 and Win 10 Acronis backups from two different Acronis licenses/programs located on this same 1 TB hard drive?

Thanks in advance to anyone who reads this and replies :) 

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Windows 10 (in my case 64 bit home edition) is kind of a strange new beast for me with this whole Microsoft Account thing they require you to have... I'm not sure what effect, if any, that has on Acronis.

Andre, I have been using Acronis on Windows 10 since it was first offered to Windows Insiders in its pre-release format, and am still running both the latest public Windows 10 build 1809 and the Insiders Windows 10 build 18309 with ATI 2019.

Please note: you do NOT have to use a Microsoft Account with Windows 10 - I do not and never have done so other than as required to handle being in the Insiders programme for that subset of the OS.  All my Windows 10 computers use a traditional local user account regardless of how Microsoft would like to trick you into believing that you have to use a Microsoft account!

I'm wondering if anyone using the 2019 or 2018 (or even 2017 or 2016) version of Acronis has used Acronis to restore an image of their "C" (Windows) hard drive back to their hard drive - and if so how well it worked out for you?

Simple answer = Yes for restoring my Windows OS partition / drive using ATI 2019, 2018, 2017 .. with no significant issues that I can remember.

One thing I should point out - currently have my computer dual booting between Windows 10 and Windows 8 .. while in theory I guess I could use my Win 8 install of Acronis to back up my Win 10 install, I'm thinking it might be safer to just purchase new licenses of Acronis for the Win 10 install even though it's all technically on the same computer, just two different SSD drives, one for Win 8 and one for Win 10 ... also I keep my Acronis backups on a different, 1 TB, sata (non SSD ) hard drive - does anyone think there would be any problems having both Win 8 and Win 10 Acronis backups from two different Acronis licenses/programs located on this same 1 TB hard drive?

I am using a triple-boot system that has Windows 10 Insiders, Windows 10 #1809 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and make a mixture of Acronis backups made with ATI 2019 which I have installed on both Windows 10 versions.  

When you are installing to the same hardware, then only 1 ATI license is needed, so you can have your ATI on both your Windows 8 and Windows 10 on the same computer as dual-boot, and only need a single license.

I tend to make my main backups from the public release Windows 10 OS and include both copies of Windows in the backups, but do occasionally make separate backups of each from their own copy of ATI, or when booted from Acronis Rescue Media.  In my case I have just a single 1TB SSHD drive rather than 2 separate SSD's per your setup, so in the event of a disk failure, I would want to be able to recover the whole drive with both Win 10 OS partitions plus my Ubuntu ones!

The key with any backups are to choose your backup task names carefully so that you keep these unique to avoid any confusion as to what is what.  Worse case would be to have 2 backups with the same default name of 'My Disk' then not be able to tell easily which is which!

Hey there Steve :) .. I'm not sure if you would remember me in particular since you have helped so many Acronis users over the years but I remember you helping me years back with another Acronis question and you rode to my rescue once again - thank you so much and thank you so much for responding to me so quickly too  :)  .. seriously you truly are the hero of this forum  :) 

(slaps head) Well darn, I wish I'd known that I could just create a local account and didn't have to bother with this "Microsoft account" nonsense (groans)... I heard some horror stories about how Microsoft gives you grief if you need to restore or reinstall your Win 10 and you don't have a microsoft account and how they tie the product key to your MS account and so forth so I let Microsoft scare me :P   .. I guess I'll just keep things as is since I already have it set up with a Microsoft account.

It sounds like (forgive me, I'm slow :P )   that I can use the Acronis license I already have installed on Windows 8 to backup my Windows 10 installation too , regardless of whether the Windows 10 install is operating under a Microsoft account or a local account, and it's okay for the Acronis Backup to reside on the same 1 TB hard drive that I have my current Win 8 backups on ... thank you, you saved me from wasting/burning an Acronis license install on my Win 10 operating system unnecessarily :) ... and yes, excellent point I will be creating a "Windows 10 backups" folder and making sure I install the Win 10 Acronis backups in that folder on the 1 TB hard drive :) 

One last question if you would be so kind as to help me out one last time :) ... given that Win 8 and Win 10 each "live" on their own separate SSD hard drive I'm guessing I should 

- go into Acronis on Windows 8 where I have it installed

- select the SSD hard drive on my computer that Win 10 is installed on and choose that entire hard drive to back up

- put the backup on the separate 1 TB hard drive dedicated to Acronis backups only (in a folder that says "Windows 10" backups of course to avoid confusion :)  ) 

- validate the backup using Acronis

And that's it, I'm pretty much set as far as having my Win 10 backup image to restore from if necessary? :) 

One last question if you would be so kind as to help me out one last time :) ... given that Win 8 and Win 10 each "live" on their own separate SSD hard drive I'm guessing I should 

- go into Acronis on Windows 8 where I have it installed

- select the SSD hard drive on my computer that Win 10 is installed on and choose that entire hard drive to back up

- put the backup on the separate 1 TB hard drive dedicated to Acronis backups only (in a folder that says "Windows 10" backups of course to avoid confusion :)  ) 

- validate the backup using Acronis

Andre, with any computers having more than one disk drive, my preference is always to make separate backups of each drive individually.  This allows any drive to be recovered should a drive failure occur without having to work through a backup with multiple drives.

It doesn't really matter where ATI is installed for making the backup - I have it on both my Win 10 OS partitions for my dual boot scenario, thus can use either as needed, which has been an easy way to recover the alternative OS when MS have borked something with a bad update!

You should definitely have your backups on another drive, and ideally, have multiple backups in different places to avoid any single point of failure or weakness.  Having backups in their own named folders and using unique names makes matters much simpler for yourself or anyone else needing to help you.

Validating your backups is something that can also be scheduled via the Advanced options of each backup task.  Personally I do not include validation with every backup action, but rather do this periodically (as allowed by the schedule options) or manually.  Validation can only guarantee that the integrity of the backup archive remains the same as it was when the file was created - it cannot guarantee that the data in the backup archive was good before the backup was created using it.