I could use your suggestions of a good backup software

We all have our Horror Stories of losing data and I just had mine!

I guess each drive has its own recycle bin and the one on my D drive got corrupted and so I had no choice but to wipe out all my data in order to fix the problem. I can re-create the data, but, it will just take some time.

So, I do have several drives on my PC and just never established a good backup plan so that my files are always properly backed up. I would be grateful if you can suggest a good backup software that is either free or low cost that you feel would most likely work for me and can provide I think what is called incremental backups, meaning that say every night it simply backs up whatever has changed since the last backup.

Suggestions?

Macrium Reflect - though I can't remember if Macrium Reflect Free does incremental backups.

Ztruker said:

Macrium Reflect Free (does incremental and differential, same as the Premium version).

I bought the Premium version for it's excellent scheduling capability. I do differential backups of my drives every Friday. C: at 8PM and D: at 9PM. I've restored different backups many times with never a problem.

The investment you need to make is an external hard drive. Buy a 1TB (or larger) external drive.

I have 3 internal drives, One 500Gb SSD as my boot drive and two 2TB drives, one for data and one for backup. Then I have a 1TB external drive I do a full backup to every 3 months or so. I've never lost a byte of data.

Following your link, I see that the free version does differential images, but not incremental backups.

Ztruker said:

Macrium Reflect Free (does incremental and differential, same as the Premium version).
The investment you need to make is an external hard drive. Buy a 1TB (or larger) external drive.

I have 2 PCs 1 is my Tower PC with 3 drives and the second with 2 drives. These two PCs are networked together via an Ethernet HUB. FYI, having all these drives was not by design. Basically, as I have switched out one PC for the next new one I just took all the working HDs out of these PCs and installed them in my current PC.

One of these drives is an external 2TB HD, so, in that regard, I'm good to go.

UPDATE: I did buy Premium Support from Microsoft for $150 for up to 5 PCs for one year. Well worth it!

As I am writing this post they were able to find a way to restore the data that was on my Drive D, Yeah! and that process is running right now (9-28-2018 - 7 PM PST) I have been on the phone with them for 3 hours now. I'm doing a lot more than just data restore. They are open 24/7, so I feel it be a great value! They can log on remotely and just do stuff for me vs struggling with trying to talk me through it........

I will add to the chorus: Macrium Reflect. I make a fresh image every week or so. In the interim, I do a daily incremental backup of my more changeable data folders using robocopy in a .bat file that I cobbled together. It's so easy if you just make it an automatic part of your routine. I have lots of stuff going back to the early 80's, and I don't want to lose any of it. In fact, this thread is reminding me that I really need to get another external HD so I can alternate - external HD's can fail...

Macrium Reflect Free lets you schedule full and differential backups. I use it on all my PCs except my main desktop PC for which I paid for the full version for the extra features e.g. incremental backups. I make scheduled backups to a connected external USB drive ans also make manual backups to a separate drive stored offline.

Note Reflect lets you mount a disk image as virtual drive to recover individual files / folders which I've found useful a few times.

I do not recommend poorly engineered and supported Acronis software.