Backup is probably the most important task you can perform to ensure the safety and security of data that's stored on your computer. I know a person who through every fault of his own lost his all of his wife's recipes. This was not the highlight of his day, or hers. It's not that hard to avoid this kind of problem.
I run an Acronis backup of the C drive twice a week: Wednesday to one external disk drive, when I also backup files from the other drives, and Sunday to a separate drive. I've described previously how I use CrashPlan to back up all of the data drives, a network attached storage drive for continuous backup of critical working files, and USB drives for weekly backups. CrashPlan doesn't back up the operating system and applications, though, so Acronis provides that critical part of the process.
Disk drives that are adequate for backing up the operating system aren't expensive. A 1TB Western Digital My Passport drive currently sells for about $65. That's sufficient if you have a 1TB or smaller boot drive partition and that's one of the reasons that I've always kept data files on a separate drive, even when the computer had just a single physical hard drive installed.
If your operating system and data files are all on drive C, you may need a larger backup drive. A 2TB drive will cost about $90 and 4TB drives are priced around $120.
Acronis True Image can backup files to an Acronis cloud server if you opt for the subscription plan or to an attached USB or NAS drive.
After installing the application, the first step in creating a backup involves specifying the source. I use True Image for the operating system drive.
Next, you'll specify the location for the backup files. TrueImage will display all of the attached disk drives that it finds, including installed drives, USB drives, mounted network drives, and any drives that are available on the network.
I use a USB drive that is attached only when I want to preform the weekly backup.
After selecting the source and destination for the backup, you'll be asked to choose a backup scheme and this is where no small number of people become confused. There are 5 options: Single version, version chain, incremental, differential, and custom.
I'm tempted to say that you should just choose version chain, but let's consider the choices you have at this point:
The easiest option is single version, which creates an entire new image every time, but version chain is the best option for many users. Version chain creates the 1st full backup version when you run True Image for the first time. After that, the program creates 1 full and 5 differential backup versions that are stored for 6 months. Then the older differential backups are automatically deleted as new versions are created. Acronis recommends this scheme for most people and I concur.
Before proceeding with the first backup, Acronis will suggest that you create a Survival Kit. There is no good reason to skip this step!
After you click (1) Back up now, you'll be prompted to create the Survival Kit.
Recovering from a catastrophic computer failure requires that you have a backup of the system disk and bootable rescue media. The Acronis Survival Kit combines both components so that a single device will have everything needed. The backup disk will have both the Acronis bootable media files and a backup of the system partition.
Click (2) create.
The process will take a few minutes as Acronis modifies the target drive to install a bootable recovery partition.
Once the Survival Kit creation is complete, the backup process will begin.
You can close the dialog box at this time and the backup will continue. You won't be prompted to create a Survival Kit again unless there have been changes that require an update.
The second backup creates a second full copy. After that, the backups will be quick differential copies until True Image needs to create another full image.
TrueImage is a relaible multi-purpose backup applicationAcronis initially concentrated on making image backups. Over the years, the scope has changed a lot and now TrueImage
includes image backups, disk cloning, on-line backup, file and directory backup, and active defenses against ransomware. There's even an option to archive large or old files to free up space on the computer by storing the files on an Acronis server. On-line backup costs more. The cost for disk cloning and local backups using a perpetual license or for a one-year subscription is $50 per computer. The cost of on-line backups varies from $100 to $260 per year depending on how much data you need to back up. Upgrades for the product with a perpetual license are priced at $30.
Additional details are available on the Acronis website.
Website developers have detested Internet Explorer from the beginning because they had to include extra code to make their pages work properly in IE. Then, three years ago, Microsoft introduced Edge, which was still based on the Trident display engine. Edge is better than IE, but it hasn't been able to develop much market share. Now Microsoft will try Chromium.
Two primary engines exist: Chromium (Google Chrome, Opera, and at least a dozen others others) with about 62% of the market and Webkit (Safari and a few others) with a 15% market share. Gecko, which is used by Firefox and other browsers has 5% of the market. Edge and Internet Explorer which use separate forks of the Trident engine have about 7%. Microsoft renamed the Edge Trident fork "EdgeHTML". Even Opera's now discontinued Presto engine at 3% has nearly the market share of EdgeHTML.
Anyone who visits the Microsoft website with any browser other than Edge will be encouraged (repeatedly!) to use the Edge browser. Maybe that will end when Microsoft releases a Chromium-powered browser. That's Chromium as in the Google Chrome browser, Opera, and a bunch of others.
The project has the code name Anaheim, as in the city south of Los Angeles. When released, it may be named Edge, Anaheim, or something else entirely. So after replacing the no-good IE with the slightly less bad Edge, they've seen the light!
Although Edge is an improvement over Internet Explorer, it still has compatibility issues and its performance is far less than Microsoft claims it is. Oh, and there are also some stability problems, but who's counting?
Microsoft, at long last, is finally adopting a rendering engine that might not create so many headaches for developers and users. The Chromium rendering engine is consistent and widely used. That should eliminate many of the stability and performance issues.
The big question might be when. My guess: No later than the middle of 2019.
Microsoft's marketers will have to perform a quick flip-flop because the company has been preaching, for 3 years now, how unstable and insecure Chrome is. Microsoft removed the Chrome installer from the Windows store. In other words, Microsoft marketing has used every trick (ethical and not so ethical) to damage Chromium. It'll be interesting to see how they change the message to "Chromium is wonderful."
In September, I wrote about OneNote, which I called "Microsoft's Hidden Gem". This week I discovered that OneNote has been discontinued as a desktop application and converted to a substandard Windows 10 app. Fortunately, the Office 2016 version of OneNote is still available.
I make extensive use of OneNote tags. In the desktop version of OneNote, any item can have one or more associated tags. All tags can be defined by the user and the first 9 tags can be applied from the keyboard (Ctrl-1 through Ctrl-9). Any tag may be defined by the user who establishes the name, a symbol to display, the color of the text, and a highlight color. All of that is gone in the app version, or what I call the Despicable Windows 10 OneNote App.
Instead, the Despicable Windows 10 OneNote App offers 6 tags that cannot be modified in any way and cannot be applied with shortcut keys. I discovered this on a Surface Pro tablet after installing Office 365. Tags created on the desktop computer were visible on the Surface, but couldn't added, removed, or changed.
It's frustrating when an application with a lot of outstanding features (OneNote 2016) receives an "improvement" that makes it worse (Despicable Windows 10 OneNote App). This is called a Verschlimmbesserung or, as Arden Bercovitz describes it when he is in character as Albert Einstein, a Schlimmbe.
Microsoft should either install the desktop version by default or at least offer the user the option to pick one or the other. Instead, the user who discovers that the Despicable Windows 10 OneNote App has been installed will have to search for the older and better version. Hint: At least for now, you'll find the 2016 version on Microsoft's website. Then you can uninstall the Despicable Windows 10 OneNote App and install OneNote 2016.
At the very least, Microsoft should make it easier for those unfortunate users who have been "upgraded" to the Despicable Windows 10 OneNote App to obtain and install the older version.
Perhaps that would be better phrased as a statement: Nothing is safe. Marriott waited 71 days to let people know that hackers had gained access to names, addresses, passport numbers and lots more. Earlier Facebook announced that 50 million of its users had their personal data compromised. Now a question-and-answer site, Quora, says it lost control of information from 100 million users.
Quora at least didn't wait 71 days as Marriott did. The breach was discovered on November 30 and announced on December 3. Quora says the crooks accesses users names, account IDs, (encrypted) passwords, and other information. The company says that it's investigating and will take steps to avoid having it happen again.
Most of the information was already public on the Quora site, but a statement by the company's management says that users should "consider" changing their passwords.
But then there's that Marriott disaster that wasn't even announced for nearly two and a half months -- and the data that Marriott's Starwood division lost is extremely valuable. Imagine what crooks could do if they had your name, address, phone number, dates when you stayed at a Starwood hotel, and your passport ID! This is the kind of information that can be used for identity theft or even physical theft in the real world. If you thought last year's Equifax breach (60 million customers) was a big deal, just imagine the scope of an attack that yielded extremely critical information from half a billion people who stayed at Marriott's Starwood properties in the past four years.
Marriott is only now beginning to notify potential victims by email. The breach affects people who stayed at W Hotels, St. Regis, Sheraton, Westin, Element, Aloft, The Luxury Collection, Le Meridien, and Four Points properties. In fairness to Marriott, these are Starwood properties and Marriott acquired Starwood in 2016. No data from Marriott-branded hotels was lost.
Marriott says the stolen credit card information was encrypted, but the hackers may also have made off with components needed to decrypt the critical information.
