Try&Decide

When you turn Try&Decide on, your computer is in the Try mode. After that you can perform any potentially dangerous operations without worrying that you might damage your operating system, programs or data. When you turn Try&Decide off, you decide if you want to apply the changes to your computer or you want to discard them.

When Try&Decide can help

We recommend that you turn Try&Decide on before you try to:

• Change any system settings, when you are not sure how these changes may affect your computer.
• Install system updates, drivers, etc.
• Install unfamiliar applications.
• Open mail attachments from unknown senders.
• Visit websites that might contain potentially troublesome content.

Please remember that if you download e-mail from a POP mail server, create new files or edit existing documents while in the Try mode, and then decide to discard your changes, those files, document changes, and mail will no longer exist. In this case, save the new files and edited documents, for example, to a USB flash drive and unplug it before discarding the changes.

How Try&Decide works after a computer restart

You can leave the Try&Decide turned on as long as you like, because this mode "survives" across reboots of your operating system.

When your computer reboots for whatever reason while working in the Try mode, before booting of the operating system starts, you will be shown a dialog offering you two choices – stop the mode and discard changes or continue working in the mode. This will allow you to discard the changes that have resulted in a system crash. On the other hand, if you reboot, for example, after installing an application, you can continue working in the Try mode after starting Windows.

Every "soft" reboot of your computer while in the Try mode results in adding up to 500 MB of Try&Decide's housekeeping data into the storage selected for storing virtual changes.

Limitations in using Try&Decide

If you use Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows 10, please, be aware that in the Try mode the program may use free disk space quite intensively, even when your computer is idle. This is due to housekeeping activities such as indexing that run in the background.

Please note that while working in the Try mode you will experience slowing down of the system performance. Furthermore, the process of applying changes may take a long time, especially if you leave the Try mode turned on days on end.

Please be aware that Try&Decide cannot track changes in disk partitions, so you will be unable to use the Try mode for virtual operations with partitions such as resizing partitions or changing their layout. In addition, you must not use the Try&Decide and disk defragmentation or disk error checking utilities at the same time, because this can irreparably corrupt the file system, as well as make the system disk unbootable.

When the Try mode is started, you won't be able to use the previously activated Acronis Startup Recovery Manager. Rebooting the computer in the Try mode will allow you to use Acronis Startup Recovery Manager again.

Try&Decide and Nonstop Backup cannot work simultaneously. Starting the Try mode suspends Nonstop Backup. Nonstop Backup will resume after you stop the Try mode.

When the Try mode is started, you won't be able to use the "Hibernate" power saving mode.

Try&Decide cannot be used for protecting dynamic disks.

Try&Decide cannot work when a partition in your system is encrypted with BitLocker.

Try&Decide cannot protect Acronis Secure Zone or use it as a storage for the virtual changes.