Do you prefer incremental or differential backups?

tend to limit myself to differential images -- but due to my data usage the files can get pretty large & fill up my current external drive quickly.

Macrium R allows you to specify limits which should help to manage disk use both in terms of how many of which type of file to keep and in terms of free space if I recall- parameters you can configure when setting up a backup.

Scheduling and online backup: You could approach this in different ways.
a. Use a calendar to prompt you to do a backup thus reminding you to connect your backup disk and start it.
b. Keep online backup scheduled, but also have a copy or backup kept off line.

Keeping the backup disk on line clearly presents additional risks and could reduce disk lifetime.

KabyBlue said:

This has been a really enlightening discussion guys -- much appreciated. I have a few questions...


@f14tomcat Yes, am a MReflect Home Edition user as well (thnx in part to this forum). I too agree with you & @cereberus assertion of the "trustworthiness" of restore points in Windows & have that function disabled on all my devices. Am curious, just how much space are you talking about in regards to your backup storage choice?

If I may ask, what product or setup do you use for your offsite backup. I have been looking into an offsite choice for a while (such as a NAS) but need to do more research before making the jump. Or do you simply store an external drive away from you main workstation?

As far as space, I keep 2 separate external 1TB drives for backup only, never attached except for the backup process.

Although anything could damage an incremental, or differential, or a full image, I have fortunately never had that happen. I do dual backups to the 2 separate drives, to help protect against any occurrence of damage.. They take approximately 3 1/2 minutes, including verify, so it's not time consuming at all, about the time to go fill the coffee cup.

I do daily/weekly/monthly fulls, with the smattering of the incrementals as mentioned before for their purpose. Retention is 14 daily, 26 weekly, and 12 monthly. It's not only to restore a known state, I also keep so many because I can mount the image and cherry pick any file from back in time, if needed. Data, sys file, whatever.

All in what your needs are and your fallback plans. I'd rather err on the side of overkill. Drives are cheap.

Full backup with Macrium Reflect of system drive, once on an online HDD installed in the case and than copy resulting .mrimg file to a disk inserted in quick change bay.
Any important data on online disks copied manually to appropriate drives and folders in them. Things like pictures, movies, music, programs and games downloaded and things like that.

My offsite backup is very simple as I figure if I need it things are very bad. I have two laptop drives of sufficient size to carry a couple of full data backups. One is in the safety deposit box, one is at home. When then one at home is written I swap it for the one in safety deposit box. I also have USB drive that I keep multiple copies of my password vault on. They swap when the drives swap.

I note I am exposed with some of data as it is not all off site.

When I kept my offsite backup at my brother's I would encrypt entire drive. As no one has access to safety deposit box I dropped encryption.

Full backup of my C Drive where the OS is using Macrium Reflect which takes about 3 minutes to complete and about 8 to 10 minutes to restore. My D Drive I backup using SyncBackFree. I tried to do it with Macrium but it said it would take over 16 hours and there was no differential option after so I only image my main drive.

As ISP fibre speed gets ever higher one thing I've been looking into is running mirrored NAS' for the 'offsite' backups, so that you have full backups of yours and A N Others OS/data and likewise at their end.
Local copy to set it all up and then via the WAN (Internet) after that.
A friend of mine who lives reasonably close by has a consistent 1Gb FTTP symmetrical connection so I was thinking a couple of RAID1 Synology or similar NAS' at each end should do the trick?
Anyone done it (or similar)?

Any caveats to be aware of?

FYI -

I just created a full system image (about 400 GB) from a internal 2 TB SSD via USB 3.1 (Gen 2) to a external SSD (also USB 3.1, Gen 2)
Took less than 10 minutes with verification using Macrium. Simply amazing.

FWIW.