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Any advantages of Partition Backup vs. File Backup of entire Non-System Drive

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I have a data drive (i.e. not my system drive). I want to back the entire drive using incremental backups. I can either backup using Partition Backup, or using File Backup and then selecting the entire drive (i.e. D:\).

Is there any advantage or disadvantage at all to using either method in terms of speed, size or recovery options?

Thanks,
BobKat

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Hello BobCat,

Let me answer your question.

The main disadvantage of File Backup is that special Acronis snapshot technology won't be used, so there may be some issues when backing up open files.

When you back up the whole partition, Acronis will create a snapshot of the whole drive, that allows you to back up any files without any issues. Once Acronis software initializes the backup process of a volume (a single partition or a dynamic disk), Acronis Snapshot Manager flushes the file system mounted to that volume temporarily freezing all the operations on the system volume. Immediately thereafter, the Snapshot Manager driver creates a point-in-time view of the system volume and a bitmap describing the used sectors on this volume. Once the bitmap is created, the filter driver unfreezes the I/O operations on the system volume. It generally takes just several seconds to create a point-in-time view of the volume. After that, the operating system continues working as the imaging process is under way.

Speed and archive size should be the same in both types of backup.

Please reply to this thread is you have any additional questions.

Thank you.

Thank you for your answer. This will help me greatly as I keep my always open Outlook .PST files on my data drive and they might not have been backed up with the regular "File Backup" option.