I'm sorry to be negative in my very first post. But I really can't help this and hopefully you'll understand.

 

I have a 1TB external USB backup drive. I had it partitioned (D and F) where D had my data backups from a previous PC (pics, audio, documents, apps, etc). D was ~300 Gigs. The F partition was blank with 700 Gigs and ready to be used as a restoration drive.

 

Ok, so I ran the included Dell Backup and Recovery that came preinstalled on my Windows 8 machine. (So far the machine is very nice, to give a positive comment here). The Recovery section automatically selected the F partition for creating my recovery disk, so I thought that was great. I click OK to continue. Well, the software didn't just use my F partition, it overwrote my D partition that had all of my data backups and created 2 new D and F partitions. The D was now something like 500 Megs for the bootable recovery part and then the F was 930 or so gigs for the data backups. All right, so that was frustration #1.

 

Next I went to do the data backups. Fortunately, all of the data that WAS on my previous D drive was already copied over to the C drive on the PC, so I figured maybe no harm done, I could just copy the data back over to the external drive (now to the newly created 930 Gig F partition), along with the Users directory and a few others from the C drive. Guess what? Nope! The software simply crashes with one of those messages that Microsoft is checking for possible solutions. I also tried updating the Backup and Recovery software, but it's up to date!

 

Really? You include buggy backup software that simply crashes when attempting to back up? You take over an entire disk after selecting a partition to use on that disk? You do realize backups are important, right? So, now I'm back to manually backing up my data because I don't know if I can trust the Dell software. And it makes me kinda laugh that you want for me to pay $40 bucks for the premium version (is that one-time or every year)?  When stuff like this occurs, it makes me wonder if people actually test, or even better, if they actually *use* their own software so that they know whether it's functional or not. Come on, Backup and Recovery software should not do this.

 

That said, so far I really do like the PC. But I'm disappointed that the B&R didn't work correctly. How can I know that the Restore function would work any better? Well, it wouldn't since I can't back anything up.

 

Sorry for the rant.