Twwhitey

^^ THIS!! ^^ :thumbup: Sounds like you pretty much can't go wrong with Acronis for $50... even if I only use a fraction of the features regularly... Thanks for the input all!

I have found - pretty reliably - that alt-tabbing out of DCS (to the Oculus Home screen or presumably anything else) THEN pressing the rctrl-numpad1 to disable (or rctrl-numpad4 to enable) then alt-tabbing BACK to DCS shows a pretty obvious/noticeable change to the frame rate numbers on my system. ASW on and my frame rate is capped at 40 if I’m looking at anything other than sky or water (and 80 if I am). ASW OFF and the frame rate wildly fluctuates depending on what I’m looking it (50’s to 90’s and is definitely not capped). Note in my case that trying to disable/enable ASW using those key strokes from anywhere within DCS (in flight or menus) does NOT work for me (I’m on a Rift S, the stable DCS build for the record and NOT using the Oculus tray tool yet) so I’m pretty sure those keystrokes aren’t registering ASW off/on from within the game but alt-tabbing definitely works. All that being said I get seemingly respectable frame rates with ASW Off (like I said 50’s to 90’s) however there is an ever-soslight but definitely perceptible micro-stutter that ASW definitely smooths out when activated... I’d love to find a way to smooth out the ASW off experience but haven’t figured out the necessary tweak yet.

EXCELLENT! Your scenario is the exact one I want to defend against and it's good to hear to you can drastically slim down all of that Acronis "heavy footprint". All I want is manual backups and the ability to reliably restore when $%^&** Facebook decides I need an unsolicited Oculus update. As for the system tray icon... trust me I feel your pain ... I can't for the life of me get the Asus mb/system update app to NOT load on start up but that's just the OCD in me talking. :D Good stuff thanks!

Right on - interesting and good to know thanks for the feedback. I'm pretty much just interested in taking/making sporadic restore points (mostly of the C:/ O.S. drive) so I can a. rollback to a previous safe restore point say if a driver, firmware update or service pack or something introduces instability, poor perf, etc. b. restore the whole C: (O.S. drive) if the SSD gets corrupted or hosed somehow (I have 2 SSD's one dedicated to the O.S. the other to games/sims/everything else so I would deem this as pretty rare/catastrophic) I don't think I want/need fancy incremental backups or anything like that, especially if it introduces background processes that would impact perf (given I'm trying to maximize available resources for VR). Just be able to take a backup occasionally and I update a driver that sucks have the ability to easily rollback to a previous stable image. I think I need to understand better if the Win10 backup mechanism is able to image (and if need be restore) the whole bootable C: drive or is it just a "Windows only" restore point?

More detailed research seems to net that the Acronis solution has a heavy footprint on the system...so maybe not. Anyone use the built-in Windows 10 backup/system/restore point capability? Reliable? Dependable? Maybe I'm overthinking it but after all the work getting this system running well and seeing some recent horror stories on these forums about seemingly innocuous driver updates screwing up some peoples performance I'm terrified of some automated (or unforeseen) Oculus or nVidia update introducing something I can't rollback from so I'm keen to figure this out sooner rather than later...

So now that I've got my DCS system up & running satisfactorily (after admittedly too much $$$ spent and copious amounts of tweaking) it's time to think backup, especially my Win10 drive... any recommendations out there for what gamers/simmers are using to back up systems nowadays? Something that works well w/ SSD's and is suitably configurable so I can ensure it's not running in the background (to keep the system as lean as possible for DCS)? Acronis True Image seems to get some positive reviews... anyone have a recommendations they're happy with? Unhappy with? tried & true? thanks!