How effective is Windows Controlled Folder Access?

Fortitude said:

I have my laptop continuously connected to external disk drives for backup purposes. Backups take place through the day at scheduled times with no intervention by me. I use Macrium Reflect and GoodSync.

Since I see a risk in that ransomware could access my backup disks I decided to investigate the Windows Controlled Folder Access feature. Currently I get occasional warnings about programs trying to access the external disk drives and I act accordingly. Hopefully things will soon settle down and I'll stop getting any new warnings.

My idea is that if my C drive is infected by ransomware I should be able to recover by going to my backups as long as these are clean, that is before the ransomware entered my system. For this purpose I keep several versions of backups.

However, I couldn't find any third party software to keep my external drives locked and only allow access when a backup would take place. My question is, in the above circumstances how effective is the Windows Controlled Folder Access against ransomware?

Macrium Reflect (paid version) has Image Guardian, which encrypts your backups, so ransomware can't get at them.
Last I checked it was $70 (lifetime cost) for the paid version.

I called them about a month ago, and asked. The $70 version gives you 12 months tech support and upgrades, but the program will keep working for the lifetime of the computer it's installed on.

Fortitude said:

Thank you for the information. I was happy to see that Image Guardian is enabled on my system.

I'm wondering though if there is anything I could about the GoodSync backups, which effectively are straight copies of my files from the source to the destination drives.

I don't "sync" anything... ever.
I'm paranoid about sync. Even with Macrium backups, I only make full OS image backups.
I only make backups, when I or Microsoft is about to change something. Like, if I intend to make major changes, or like right before Microsoft Tuesday (2nd Tuesday of each month).

I only have about 30GB on my C;\ drive, so a full OS image backup, takes me about 2 minutes using Macrium.

There are people on here with much more experience with Syncing and keeping "running" backups.
@dalchina is probably the guy you want for questions such as yours.

Whilst you can move your whole user profile (tutorial) a far more important distinction to make, I suggest, is between your personal data and O/S + installed programs.

The latter two are so closely intertwined it is not worth considering separating them for the most part, whereas you don't want personal data being affected by a clean install or restoration of an image of your Windows partition e.g.

Better to consider keeping all personal data off C: as far as possible. But beware of the risks and mistakes its easy to make using the Location tab to which a number of threads bear witness. There are other ways.

Either is fine. And of course, backed up.

Thank you for your reply.

Doing something that is not designed as a normal feature of the O/S unsurprisingly takes you into the realm of the more risky and technically involved. I wouldn't do it personally.

Nor would I use the Location tab
a. because I've seen the mess people sometimes get into with an apparently trivial mistake
b. because those default folders get full of folders created by some 3rd party programs when installed.

Thus I take the very simple and safe approach- create my own folders that only have what I put into them.

Such folders can be added to a library or a new library created (tutorials available).

No risk of incompatibility or inconsistency with anything.

I'd prefer to get a larger disk if necessary, but with many more progs installed than the average user, a 256Gb SSD is still plenty.