Acronis v Western Digital -> NAS drive

Prompted by Bitflipper's woes I have just purchased a 6TB Western Digital MyCloud NAS drive which will be in a different building to my computers.
 
I have always used Acronis to make a C drive image and file backups of data to USB drives.
 
I am wondering if anyone has any experience with Western Digital backup software. At the moment I an considering continuing with Acronis on the USB drives and using WD's software for the NAS drive so I have two backups in different formats.

Another vote for macrium Reflect here.  Free version.  Cloned a C drive with three partitions to a new larger drive keeping the same three partitions.  Worked.  I'm going to do it again and clone the same C drive to an SSD.  Next week.  Will report the results.

fireberd
I would use "Image" rather than "Clone" for the SSD.  When you clone a drive you get everything, the good data and bad data/sectors.  With an Image you just get the "good" data....

Plus, with clone you need a free partition.  Even it it worked 100% of the time, seems like wasted space IMO, as opposed to images, which you can "collect" in a folder.

Add me to the list of happy Macrium users. I too had a nasty experience with Acronis. Never again.

Never had problems with Acronis. 

An image is a good strategy to back up a working system (OS and installed programs), but a bad strategy to back up data. You are committing everything to a proprietary format in a huge file, both of which introduce a significant possibility of data loss. There are plenty of backup programs that will copy your data files in native format (windows readable), that will put only the individual file at risk, rather than the whole bundle. With the very large hard drives available now, the need to compress backups is largely history. A huge drive, like a huge file, can represent a lot of data loss if it fails. So long as it is just a backup (i. e. there exists another secure copy of the file somewhere else) that is not a major problem. But if you are using the drive for primary, albeit off the system, storage, then a couple of smaller drives may make more sense. The disk imaging system introduced in Win7 is still available in Win10 if you want to use that, although Microsoft seems to be less enthusiastic about it these days.
 
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3011736/windows/how-to-create-an-image-backup-in-windows-10-and-restore-it-if-need-be.html
 
Also note that NAS drives are specifically designed to work in an NAS environment, where it is assumed that they are part of a fault tolerant array. In practical terms that means that they will retry reads on questionable sectors fewer times than a desktop drive, on the assumption that the same data can be recovered more rapidly by failing the drive and getting it from another mirrored drive or using a parity drive. A drive designed for desktop use is less likely to result in data loss if used as an individual outside a RAID system.

For kontakt libraries, play libraries and vsl libraries I use this tool

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freefilesync/

Its better than synctoy and works over a network.

So I backup my sample drives to another computer and so far no problems. After first sync it only copies or removes the changes... Very efficient. This prog also makes a copy of my quickload folders too!!

Only thing I'd like is to make an image of my c drive.. Just in case windows 10 corrupts itself again.... So was wondering is windows 10 image tool reliable?

I use Acronis with USB and both WD & Seagate NAS drives.
 
 

Just an update - I had started another thread in software about FreeFileSync. http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3429081 Seems there is a lot of bloat installed with the program unless you are careful but there are some satisfied customers. I am wary of it.
 
I tried SyncToy and it seems to be working fine so for the time being at least my backup stategy is.

• C: drive images using Acronis, independently to the USB drive and the NAS drive and retaining one or two previous images.
• Acronis File backups for libraries, projects etc. to the USB drive.
• Data folder mirrors on the NAS drive kept in sync with SyncToy.
• Acronis file backups (in addition to the mirror) on the NAS drive for the most critical data.

I figure that while the mirror is slower and takes more space it is not dependent on any software and not commiting all the data to one huge file.
 
 
 

patm300e
I only back up data not the entire system.  If I loose a system disk, I get a new one and start over with a clean install.  Yes, it is a pain, but it does tend to clean up the system after years of fiddling!

There is value in that but a disk image will get you up and running a lot faster should disaster strike when you in the middle of a project.

FWIW
 
In Windows 10, There's the built-in 'Windows 7' backup, plus there's the File History feature too. No real need to purchase another backup program. 
 
I'm using both File History, as well as Windows image backup Both are set to use an external USB3 drive. All bases covered. No muss, no fuss, no fuzzing around.