gHacks published a review of this backup software at the end of September. An excellent review and worth your time if you intend to download the software. You’ll have to leave an email address to get a key to unlock the free version. Not unreasonable. No surprises during installation, according to M. Brinkmann of ghacks, and the free version has all the options available. So, why is there a ‘paid for’ version? From what I can gather from their website, the only difference is that the ‘paid’ version includes individual tech support. There are faqs and a “Support Center” but no Forum.

Renee Becca really looks like Acronis – both in capabilities and in some of its appearance.

My take is that it’s an excellent piece of software, but doesn’t encrypt the backup and, has no way to create a “disk image”.

So, what’s the difference between the two backup styles?

When you clone a hard drive on another one, you can swap the original with the copy and it'll be back up and running in no time. If you image a drive, you need to boot from the Imaging software and restore that image on the drive before being able to use it. So: When you image a drive you need a bootable media to restore the image. You can read more about the topic here.

Renee Becca can be found here: http://www.reneelab.com/data-backup

Comparatively, Renee Becca is an excellent piece of software. There are others as well, such as Macrium Reflect Free (at Major Geeks) which has the ability to clone and disk image, but not incrementally back up which Renee Becca has. To compare features in Macrium versions check here. Besides Macrium, there are others like EaseUS and AOMEI…there are many.

So…if you need backup software…make sure to get one of them, because you DO NOT want to be caught without a very recent, verified backup (clone or image) AND a rescue disk which both Renee Becca and Macrium Reflect Free can create.

Have a good Sunday!