How long do your image backups take - Full Disk vs Diff vs Increment?

Ah yes, there it is in the Advanced Options/settings, never knew that, don't understand the other options.

Hi there
If you just image the OS (have on separate HDD or partition) you shoulfn't need anything like imaging 230 GB -- a typical windows installation will be around 60 GB which will image to around 40GB and take minutes even on modest hardware.

For data etc it's another issue and this is where incremental / differentials come into play -- unless you do a lot data editing etc after the initial backup these shouldn't take more than minutes either -- you shouldn't need to full copy / image data disks very often -- say once a month or so if your incrementals / differentials are fairly small.

Convention though for speed is usually Mb/s is bits whereas the capital B (MB/s is bytes) although this is kept in determining or expressing Internet and network speeds there's real confusion when it comes to data transfer via programs like Macrium.

Cheers
jimbo

@KabyBlue Looks like the bottle neck is in writing your image. 81MB/s is pretty slow. Probably due to the WD Passport device. They use the slowest Hard drives (probably 5400rpm's) and maybe what chipset they use for USB Interface (There are fast ones & slow ones).

storageman said:

@KabyBlue Looks like the bottle neck is in writing your image. 81MB/s is pretty slow. Probably due to the WD Passport device. They use the slowest Hard drives (probably 5400rpm's) and maybe what chipset they use for USB Interface (There are fast ones & slow ones).

Yeah I figured as much. Hopefully when SSD price/GB drop further down, I can afford a 2-4TB external SSD

jimbo45 said:

If you just image the OS (have on separate HDD or partition) you shoulfn't need anything like imaging 230 GB -- a typical windows installation will be around 60 GB which will image to around 40GB and take minutes even on modest hardware.

For data etc it's another issue and this is where incremental / differentials come into play -- unless you do a lot data editing etc after the initial backup these shouldn't take more than minutes either -- you shouldn't need to full copy / image data disks very often -- say once a month or so if your incrementals / differentials are fairly small.

Thnx for the input...

I am a fan of the incremental backup strategy but also try to keep the amount of incremental images in a "chain-link" at a minimum (at most 3-5) at which point I just go ahead and create another full image backup.