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Do I need TI 2011 home with Win 7?

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Hi Everyone,

Just Upgraded to Win 7 and have set up the Win 7 back-up scheduler to back-up a disk partition every night. Win 7 allowed me to create a recovery CD, I guess my question is do I NEED TI Home 2011 & why?

What does TI 2011 offer that I don't have with Win 7 back-up & restore? Thanks so much for any information on this...

Steve

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I went through the same question when I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate. I tried the integrated back up for a while and came to the conclusion it provided robust basic protection but couldn't get me what I wanted. I needed a flexible way to do system partition images and file backup. Here are my thoughts:

- TI allows you to customize your backup scheme to your needs. Win 7 back-up and restore system imaging works just fine if you can store and just need full image backups. For example, if you use Win 7 to do a daily system image, you might need a lot of backup space. With TI you could do a full image backup one day, and then incremental or differential images the rest of the week or during the day, for example.

- TI provides better and easy file versioning. Although Win Pro and Ultimate provide versionning with shadow copies, their approach has the disadvantage of storing older versions on the same disk as the data. If the disk fails, you lose the older versions. If the space allocated to shadow copy is used up, you lose older versions. This can go pretty fast if you have big videos files that you modify, as I do. BTW I use different continuous backup software to backup my content files and keep versions, and I redundantly use TI's file-based scheduled backup. I didn't want to use non-stop backup for files from TI because I coudn't customize how often TI updates the backup (every 5mn is too often when you modify large files often). With TI regular file backups, you can easily browse for older versions of files through the same interface as Win 7, but your are only limited by your backup storage. It is a harder to browse for the right version with Win 7 file backup.

- TI provides continuous partition protection. Although Win provides continuous system protection and restore functionality, it is limited in its ability to fully restore a system to its previous state. I have learned this the hard way with Vista and now with Win7, and don't use a file/data based backup for my system partition. TI has a non-stop backup feature that can protect a partition or individual folders and put that backup on another backup drive. I use non-stop backup for my system partition and do redundant regular full images of the same partition with scheduled backups.

- Finally, TI allows you to encrypt your backups. I couldn't find a way to protect backup data from other eyes with Win 7. I want all my content backup to be encrypted. If I used a bitlocker protected backup disk, then I wouldn't be able to access it for disk recovery.

At any rate, I want to have several protected backups, using different technologies, with different data life duration on different sites. I have had experience where I had to recover really old files that were purged from my local backups, or tried to restore from backups that turned out corrupted, etc. But hey, you might have simpler requirements, stronger peace of mind and be just fine with a daily Win 7 backup with or without system image.