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I've been using Paragon Drive Backup Personal v. 8.51 for awhile and
I'm happy to say the new v. 9.0 Personal Edition now has an
exclusion feature. Esp. if you often have large video files on your
HD this can bulk up and slow down your system snapshots, or induce
you to first copy to an external drive, then delete, before backing up.
With the new feature you can exclude entire folders or files by
wildcard etc.. For example, to avoid backing up my large video files
I have C:\DVD\*.* in the exclusion list.
One proviso though, I would recommend excluding entire folders
instead of file types that are scattered all over because if you should lay
the partition back on from the snapshot, in explorer you will see
phantom files. The directory entry is there but you didn't really back up
the file. By restricting the exclusions to entire folders or easy to
remember singular files, after a restore simply delete the phantom
entries. (I found this out because I actually did a backup and
restore. Since I knew v. 8.51 worked and had a recent backup with that
version I figured it's a good time to test it.)
This is especially good for Vista since the OS is bulky enough
without including giant files that are replaceable, in the snapshot. It
typically cuts a good 15 minutes off my backup times.
The other improvement.. with v. 8.51 to make the good Linux based
recovery CD you had to download the image from the web page once
you registered the software. Now at the point of sale you get a
complete download. When you burn the CD image using the main Windows
program it's the Linux based recovery CD.
I'm happy to say the new v. 9.0 Personal Edition now has an
exclusion feature. Esp. if you often have large video files on your
HD this can bulk up and slow down your system snapshots, or induce
you to first copy to an external drive, then delete, before backing up.
With the new feature you can exclude entire folders or files by
wildcard etc.. For example, to avoid backing up my large video files
I have C:\DVD\*.* in the exclusion list.
One proviso though, I would recommend excluding entire folders
instead of file types that are scattered all over because if you should lay
the partition back on from the snapshot, in explorer you will see
phantom files. The directory entry is there but you didn't really back up
the file. By restricting the exclusions to entire folders or easy to
remember singular files, after a restore simply delete the phantom
entries. (I found this out because I actually did a backup and
restore. Since I knew v. 8.51 worked and had a recent backup with that
version I figured it's a good time to test it.)
This is especially good for Vista since the OS is bulky enough
without including giant files that are replaceable, in the snapshot. It
typically cuts a good 15 minutes off my backup times.
The other improvement.. with v. 8.51 to make the good Linux based
recovery CD you had to download the image from the web page once
you registered the software. Now at the point of sale you get a
complete download. When you burn the CD image using the main Windows
program it's the Linux based recovery CD.