Hoping to understand

I'm new to Paragon 12 Home, but have used others extensively. I am impressed, but confused. The statements below are questions. I don't know the answer to any of them, and would appreciate guiding comments, about how to best use this product. The manual is full of details, but I'm missing the big picture somehow.

1. Generally, I think I always want only full backups of individual partitions (I only want something restorable). I think the only way to do that is to each time manually create a new empty directory on the archive disk, and do a backup into that new location each time? Is that correct? An empty directory location does a Full backup, and any previously used directory is one of the partials?

2. If I do a second Express mode Smart Backup into that same folder location at later date, it seems clear it is no longer Full. Is this second Smart Backup Incremental or Differential? Seems to be Incremental, requiring individual manual restores of each one. However, each one grows even larger than the previous, which does not seem right. The new files are named like arc_31101223395a1423. A date would be helpful, as it seems one has to look inside each one to determine file dates, to establish order of Restore. I guess I was thinking one click (like on the directory name) ought to automatically restore everything in it... Isn't that the only purpose? Computers could do that date examination and sequencing.

3. If this second backup in one directory (following a previous Smart Backup) is expressly selected as Differential (instead of Smart), will one Restore click then automatically restore all?

Thanks for any clue.

 

A couple of clues. I only do full sector-based image backups (bit file backups) so don't have much of a clue about using Paragon for anything else. What I'm writing is based on Paragon Backup & Recovery 10 but should be similar for other versions.

The Smart Wizard from what I can see is to make partition or disk based image backups or selecting things like email or My Documents. If you want a differential or fle incremental there are wizards for that task.

You don't have to create a blank folder to get a full. AFAIK, it always creates a full and if it didn't, changing the name of the archive should cause it to do a full because it wouldn't know what to base to use with the incremental or differential. In the wizards for those operations you have to select the previously made archive to use as the base archvie.

The date is actually in the arc_3110123xxxxxx number you referenced. It was made on 31 October 2012 and the rest of the number is likely the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight or something like that to ensure a unique number each time you create one. I normally wipe that arc_xxxxxxxxs stuff out and put in something more obvious like C_2012Oct31_BeforeUpdatingMSOffice

All of my Paragon archives are stored in the same folder in the archive drive.

No idea what is going on with the second backup. The Express Launcher tends to be just a simpler basic interface sitting on top of the Advanced Interface. I only use the Advanced.

Don't know about the one-click restoration. Normally, it is a good idea to be able to select which point you want to restore to so you can roll-back in case some problem like a virus or bad installation happened. To restore to the latest you would click on the latest differential or incremental. To restore to an earlier time you would click on the diff or incr made before or on that date.

I know I haven't answered all you questions completely but I hope this helps a bit.

If you have a spare drive (in case things don't work as you think they should) doing some tests is a big help in determing what you need to do to meet your specific backup requirements.

 

Thanks, that helps, turns on the light. I saw those utilities, but imagined they were for the subsequent operations, as the partial addons. I suppose any first has to be full however.

Smart Backup was very prominent, and its first choice says "disk or partitions", and it does partitions. I could not figure out what method it used. Always full seems to match the file sizes I saw, makes sense, and it probably matches my goal. You'd think the manual could mention what it does.

I had the wrong idea there too. I imagined the folders had significance, and did not recognize the significance of the file name. Not sure how I got that folder idea, but I was reading the manual.

Ah so, of course, thanks. Glance was too quick, but I did not recognize the leading day of the European method, I could only imagine the US month first.

So you are saying, that if differential or incremental, you can simply click on the latest file, and it will restore the early full base, and whatever subsequent files it needs (just one more for differential), to give a complete and proper disk image copy matching that latest you clicked? That should be very satisfactory.