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Using the drive being backed up (by Acronis True Image 2018)

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Using our external drives during Acronis 2018 backup:

I have just migrated to a new Win 10 PC where we are keeping our data files on separate external drives from the partitioned internal hard drive. My first backup attempt last night failed, when I was trying to backup the external drives along with the internal ones. One of the externals evidently had some disk errors on it, now fixed.

I've successfully backed up the internal disk/drives, only, with a weekly differential plan, and plan to set up separate weekly backup for the external drives with our data files on them. Maybe it's a good idea to back up the internal and external drives separately, in any case. 

Acronis doesn't announce it's running in the background and when we open the program to see how backups are proceeding it prompts us to close the program so it can backup in the background. This seems to be encouraging us to keep using the computer while the backup is in progress.

Question 1: In the past on the old Win7 PC we found the backup slowed the computer so much there was no point in trying to use it during backup. I'm wondering if there are any drawbacks, besides potential slowness, if I now launch my first backup of the very large set of files on the external drives and try to use the computer while the first such backup is in progress? (The destination drive for the backup is not the one I might use during backup, only the other two drives with our files on them.)

Question 2: I'm also wondering if any of the later versions of Acronis flag for the user in some way that backup is in progress? I'm setting up calendar reminders for us of our backup schedules but we would like it if the system alerted us to the backup underway if we forget it's happening.

Question 3: If you upgrade to a later version (or move to a new computer on the same edition) do your current edition backups remain accessible for restore? I have a backup in this edition of Acronis from our old system on the destination drive (which I can see in Windows Explorer) and I don't know if I should just delete that, now. If individual files from it might be restorable, for example, there might still be value in keeping it.

Thanks. 

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Acronis uses VSS when doing backups, which means that you are able to use the PC as usual while a backup is going on. For a PC with low specifications (RAM, CPU, small/slow storage) it can impact on responsiveness. When setting up a backup there is an option that allows you to select the performance level (it is under the Advance Tab). The level of compression used will also have an impact on performance - the higher the level the greater the impact.

The location where the backup being stored is located can impact on responsiveness - for external drives you should be using a USB 3/3.1/3.2 port rather than USB 2. If you are backing up to Acronis Cloud (which you presumably are not as you are using ATI 2018) the upload speed of you connection will impact on performance. 

Ian