Hello.

My C drive is 13.7 GB of used data.

I just made a backup of the C drive, to an external hard drive.  There were 3 files made. 

• C_VOL-b001          4,193,616 KB
• C_VOL-b001.sp1    4,193,992 KB
• C_VOL-b001.sp2    2,166,145 KB

Go here and download and save the User Manual. This will answer most of your questions. If you are still unsure of a particular procedure, then post back.

 Yes the files are compressed.  Also because your external drive is FAT32 and not NTFS, the file size limit is 4GB, so your image had to be created as 3 files.

My 18GB of usage C: drive is compressed down to about 9GB using standard compression.

 You would not be able to access the files on another computer without ShadowProtect installed.  With the software installed on the other computer you can access the image as another hard drive.
 

Keep in mind that you are allowed to install the mount tools on any of your other machines without a new license of the product.  This way you can access or test out the backup image files any time without messing with your production systems.

STC

I remain a new user, and this software is really making me learn some new things.  I am still on the trial version.

I have a pc -this is where I installed the trial version.  I am backing up my files to an external hard drive 500GB.  

Should I install ShadowProtect onto the external hard drive and not the PC itself? 

On a side note.  I would like to have just one full copy of my computer, I don't see a need to keep multiple copies.  How do I do that, since the weekly backup puts multiple copies out there?

You should install ShadowProtect to the Program Files directory normally found on your system drive.  Once installed, the product is always running, so you do not want it installed on any type of removable drive.

If you only wish to keep 1 copy of your Backup Image set, then you can set the Retention Policy to 1.  This will delete the older backups automatically.

STC