What External Hard Drive to Buy?
It was going to take over six days (!) to back up my 40GB hard drive to the Cloud. I was advised here to change my Backup Scheme, but Support tells me there's only one Scheme when backing up to Cloud. Also, the length of time to back up to Cloud is entirely dependent on my modem speed. Well, BS! MIne isn't that slow. So, you pay your money to get more cloud storage and take your chances, huh?
So, I guess my only alternative if I want to back up my Entire PC is to buy an external hard drive. Having never done that -- and displaying my ignorance -- can I just buy almost any 1+TB hard drive? Or are only some compatible with Acronis?
You can buy a 2TB for only about 10% more cost and get twice the space.
I "back up" the "back up" of all my important, can't lose, stuff.
Mainly because a few years ago a hard drive died on me and I lost a lot of important stuff.
I also use the Cloud as well in case my equipment is stolen or my house burns down.
Cheery scenarios but they do happen.
Backup to the cloud is slow - about 2 Gbyte / hour on my internet connection. The restore process is slow, as well.
However, you may have some documents that represent an extreme loss. Set up cloud backup, with a password, if you want more security than the user login.
This past summer I was working in ATI and incidentally deleted a backup. The next morning one of my HDD was not recognized and ultimately was replaced. These were financial records and coursework completed documents. When I attempted to restore the partition from my external HDD, the backup had been deleted by user error! Cloud backup took a 1/2 day to complete.
ATI seems to have less features now, but more of the process is automated. You can have the cloud backup updated everyday.
Don't delay in creating a boot CD or USB key. Restoring from external media, before the computer boots into the OS is more reliable. Any *.tib files saved to an external drive can be located when booting to a CD/DVD or USB. To boot to USB, you will have to use F2 and select. Try the boot process. Just exit before making any changes.
If you have irreplaceable content on your hard drive, ie content you cannot purchase back, for example work of art, family pictures, business or family records, you should use backup best practices. Leave a disk hooked up on the computer to backup, have another backup disk in the office or somewhere else, safely stored. Then change the disks from time to time. For important files, I would also use plain copies in addition of Acronis. The reason is that if the Acronis TIB container gets corrupted, no data can be retreived from it.