Free Backup Software

[Wainuitech]

"but trying to do that with the whole C drive while its in use is near impossible anyway."

No problems, I've been doing exactly that with Acronis for many years

Never played around much with Acronis, might be worth a look at. You will probably find that the software reboots into its own startup mode to image the drive while windows is shut down?

Any Backup is only any good if it works. Years ago I used Acronis, one of my customers used it as well. BUT on the customers machine, even though it said it was backing up OK, when it was actually required the whole lot were corrupted. We contacted Acronis, and there reply said it was  the Owners fault for not checking the backups actually worked, and nothing they would do.
Thats when I changed to Macrium.

At least with Macrium  you can go into any backup as a mounted drive and extract any number of files. And the actual Image can also be run in its own Viboot as a VM.

Mine backs up every day, as long as the computers on, including full Images, no reboots required, it will run quite happily if I'm using the computer or not.

Got several types of backups, Images from Macrium (daily) 1 Full backup weekly and incremental daily, as well as documents and files that change all the time are backed up live, meaning as soon as any changes are done they auto backup. (using One Drive).

The other day, I reinstalled one computer in the lounge, did a backup with Macrium, then the following day when installing some programs something went horribly wrong and corrupted the system   Put the Image back from the day before ( took all of 4 minutes) and carried on.