I’m particularly harsh on backup software because it’s mission critical. The recovery disc, which uses the same GUI and the aforementioned Windows PE, booted fine, and the restore process proceeded apace for the first couple of partitions, but then seemingly had issues creating the actual Windows partition, noting some sort of Windows error. What I am sweating is the failure of the disaster recovery restore. Bottom line, the backup completed, and that’s the important thing, so I’m not sweating it. But there was no warning, no minimized program window, and no system tray icon to show that the process was still active. Happily, the backup didn’t stop, and the process was visible in Task Manager.

The backup will continue, but there’s no clue to that until you launch the program again. Oddly, you can close the program while a backup is in progress. The logic stems from full backups restoring faster, with incremental (really fast) and differential (fast) backups saving time during the backup phase, which occurs far more often than restoration (hopefully!), where they slow the process.

Usually, one full backup a week with incremental or differential backups the other six days. This mimics the standard IT strategy of periodic full backups as well as smaller incremental and differential backups.

Uniquely, you can also set combinations of full and incremental/differential backups. You may also back up to network locations, which is not always a given in the free backup-software realm. While the imaging and whole drive/partitions functions that are present in Hard Disk Manager are disabled, all the options the average user will need for file backups are active: compression, post-backup notification and verification, logging, backup retention policies (days, # of backups, out of room), as well as full, incremental (all data since last backup), and differential (all data since last full backup) backups. After you’ve defined your backup, a handy summary with quick links to settings is displayed.

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