Book Reviews and Money Saving Tips

I downloaded EASEUS Todo Backup to my Windows 7 desktop. It was free and Free always attracts my attention. It set up easily and looked good. Documentation said it supported Windows 7. I got it to clone my hard drive to a 300gb Seagate External USB drive. It appeared to be fine. I decided in the event the desktop hard drive failed, I wanted to be able to just pop the external drive in for the replacement. In order to do that, I had to find a drive with the same interface that the desktop supports. Once I got my new drive I tried to clone the desktop drive to it. After multiple failures of the software to complete the cloning process I gave up. I had a lot of trouble getting the first clone done and this set of attempts just turned me off of the software. I am not a tech. I am a reasonably knowledgeable user. If I have to tweak software to get it to work, hold it’s hand and whisper in it’s ear to get the job done, I DON’T WANT IT. I want something I can recommend that works easily...

I’m sure the people at Acronis would rather I was writing about their latest release version 12 instead of version 11. However an indisputable source, my brother, told me that version 12 was fraught with peril. Since I dealt with enough peril when my BounceBack clone feature didn’t work, I decided to avoid more frustration and peril and go with version 11. In an earlier blog I expressed my dismay over BounceBack’s drive cloning feature. Drive cloning is making an exact duplicate of your hard drive including all hidden files and most importantly the OS. This feature is invaluable if and when or maybe just when your hard drive decides to head south, winter or not. BounceBack was doing a commendable job on daily backup and made file restoration quite easy. However on a limping hard drive BounceBack’s clone feature refused to work. I turned to me geek brother who is still working and who used to be my top tech and asked what he would recommend. He strongly recommended Acronis version 11. O...