My mother just bought herself a stylish red WD Passport external hard drive. Hardware and cable are nice quality and it's showing excellent performance.
Of course, it came with the WD backup software. I keep seeing high praise for Macrium Reflect. Is this still the case, such that I shouldn't even bother with the WD software?
You will receive many responses on this question. It's been posted many times. My opinion, delete all the WD software or format the drive NTFS and have a nice clean brand new drive with no vendor "stuff". Use Macrium. It's free, reliable, touted many times over and over, lots of knowledge here on the forum for it.
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free
Might be best to find out what she is happy using. There are plenty of imaging tools around. They all seem to do the job. There are differences in ease of use, features and so on. Maybe she could take a look at a couple and see which she finds easiest.
You will receive many responses on this question. It's been posted many times. My opinion, delete all the WD software or format the drive NTFS and have a nice clean brand new drive with no vendor "stuff". Use Macrium. It's free, reliable, touted many times over and over, lots of knowledge here on the forum for it.
Of course, she can peruse all known backup software to see what fits best. I addressed her question, specifically.
An added note: The builtin Windows Backup and Restore (not to be confused with Restore points, they are different) is being deprecated (discontinued and not supported) by Microsoft. It should be avoided.
Regardless of what you choose, always get your software from the vendor, not a 3rd party download site. That will help you avoid unwanted "add-ons" in the installer, and possible malware.
Last edited by f14tomcat; 27 Jul 2018 at 17:01.
The WD software I remember (some years ago) was basically a "lite" version of Acronis True Image. Having used Acronis True Image for several years (and it failing me twice) I switched to Macrium Reflect (V5 at the time). No problems with Macrium, so far.
Macrium Reflect is excellent. WD used to use Acronis software. If WD Backup is based on Acronis backup software then I wouldn't touch it with a bargepole.
Hi there
WD backup is probably OK - but usually these things are more geared to that specific drive or a hobbled version of a real product probably based on Macrium anyway.
I've tried a few in my time - started with Acronis - but gave that up after their ridiculous interface change and completely Bonkers activation system. Easus didn't really work for me -- found Macrium absolutely OK on all sorts of hardware - and being free (most people don't need commercial / paid version) you can run it on as many machines as you like.
I'd stick to Macrium for Windows -- and if you run Linux type NAS boxes install GRSYNC (Free software) on your NAS box so you can back up NAS files to external HDD's easily --GRSYNC is a GUI front end to RSYNC which can easily backup files / directories etc - including only changed files so excellent archiving tool.
Using Macrium and GRSYNC haven't needed any other backup tools for years now.
Cheers
jimbo
Unusually, the free version is...
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free...licensed for both home and business use
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