Need Help Understanding Backups with Macrium

@blulil87 the problem with keeping a cloned drive as a spare is that you’ll need to update it whenever any changes are made to the original. With a backup image stored on a suitable external drive it’s relatively easy to run either incremental or differential update to the original. If the OS drive should fail simply replace it with a new drive, boot the PC with the USB Rescue Drive, and then restore the latest image. Seems, at least to me, easier then periodically cloning and entire drive.

Try looking at it like this:
If you need to restore a disk image of Windows, do you think you can do that when Windows is running?

No, you can't. To be able to do that, the partitions comprising the O/S needed to be treated effectively as data.

That's why you create (from within Macrium) a bootable MR disk:


Now with your image files on external storage medium (so you can remove it for safe storage and keeping as a basic strategy) - say a USB HDD -

a. plug in your USB HDD with image files on it
b. plug in your MR boot device
c. boot your PC from the MR boot device
d. restore partitions as required on your internal disks from a suitable image on your USB HDD.

Note that any partition can be imaged- including data partitions.

Note that a UEFI installation of windows comprises 4 partitions typically. All should be imaged.

A disk image set can comprise (e.g. with the free edition):

- a base (initial) image - larger, slower to create
- a number of differential images (smaller, faster) - each being the difference between the base image and 'now'

A partition can be restored from
- the base image
- any differential image (and the base image).

Therefore disk image sets can offer several dates to which you can restore partitions.

Cloning is almost certainly slower than creating differential images (typcially takes a few minutes) and requires more storage for multiple images.

I agree with you. Macrium's manual isn't very complete. But, that is almost with all software these days. Instruction manuals are not very clear and comprehensive, especially with the constant version changes. People simply don't have time to describe instructions in perfect detail. Macrium is a little better though because even though their manual may not be that great, the software is slightly bit more intuitive (once you start to use it for about 10 minutes).

There is something called the Rule of Three with backups. You should always have 3 copies of something that is important. You should make sure that it's on at least 2 different mediums (discs, SSD, etc.). You should make sure that two of them are at least 2 different sites, e.g. one site catches on fire.

Flash drives are the worst and will last a few months to a few weeks. Hard drives and SSD's last longer that flash drives but which (hard drives or SSD) will last longer depends upon how the drive is used. People say that their hard drive has lasted them 10 years thus far. What they neglect to check is if that's really true. Some of their data may have already degraded and they haven't noticed.

Whether you want to use a different software depends upon if you want to back it up for the long-term or it's something that you access every day and which youthen get rid of in a couple of months.

To "start" a dead drive, you can copy a simple OS created by Microsoft called Win RE. It's a bare-boned OS that allows you to start your computer that you can get your data off the dead drive. With Macrium Reflect, you have the option to put Win RE on the local drive itself as a separate partition. Or, you can install it on a USB flash drive. Or you can do both if you want to waste the space. I just put it on a small USB flash drive because I don't want to create another partition as it looks messy to me. When you boot your computer with Win RE via Macrium Reflect, you will be given the option to pick which Macrium backup copy that you want to open or which backup copies you want to download from your dead drive.

So, how often should you save your data? I don't distinguish really between work and personal stuff because I like to have the same amount of backups. You probably at least want data that goes back once every year from the very beginning of your life. So, what I do is the following. Every year, I create a "full image" disc backup that is never marked to be deleted. That means the entire Macrium disc image is saved. There are 3 types of backups image types: full image, differential, and incremental. Full image is the safest but takes the most space. Next, a differential image is just a copy of the difference in data between the the last full image and the day you are saving the differential image. When you make another differential copy later, it will be the difference between the last full image and all the changes on the new save date. The previous differential saved image doesn't make a difference. This is the second safest type of copy and it requires much less space since you are only saving the changes made since the last full image copy. Finally, there are incremental copy images which are changes from the last save you made. So, say you make a full image save on Day 0. Then, on Day 3, you make an incremental image which consist of the changes you made since Day 0 and Day 3. Then, say your next incremental image save date is Day 10. This incremental image will only consist of the data between Day 10 and Day 3. So, you can see that incremental images saves even more space as the day 10 image doesn't save anything from day 0 and day 3. But, everything comes with a price. With incremental changes, if any of the incremental changes are flawed, then all the incremental changes after the flawed image are all garbage. So, if Day 3's image is bad, then Day 10's incremental image will be bad too. As you can see, it's a balance between saving space and being careful and saving more data.

So, why is this all important when setting up Macrium? Because you need to set a schedule of full, differential, and incremental images. Personally, I would love to make a full image every day for a year but that would use up an enormous amount of space. If you have 1 TB of space, that's 365 TB of space. If you add the differential and incremental images, you'll double that amount. How about making a full image once a month? That's probably be about 20 TB of disc space to back up just 1 TB. Not very practical, right?

Personally, what I do is make a full image every 3 months that only goes back 1 year. So, if I create a document and delete it 8 months ago, there is a still a chance that I could still recover it. Then, I have a differential image that is made every 2 weeks for the past 6 weeks. That means that I have a copy of my data that goes back every 2 weeks for 6 weeks. I do this because say I made some changes 4 weeks ago but if 3 weeks ago, I erased the document. I can rely on the 4 week old differential image to retrieve the document. Finally, I create an incremental image every day for the past 14 days. This way, if I had a version of a document that I made but deleted 3 days ago, I can still retrieve it. If I want something 11 days ago, I get the incremental image 11 days ago.

To maintain the same number of full, differential, and incremental image, an incremental image is made every day and the oldest incremental image is erased so there are always 14 total images. Similarly, every 2 weeks, I create a new differential image and the oldest differential image is erased so there are always only 6. And, a full image every 3 months is made and the oldest 5th full image is erased unless it's one of the end of the year full images which I keep. Even this routine takes up a lot of space. For 1 TB of space, it's takes about 7 TB to back up I think.

I know this sounds all confusing I bet but this is what you're supposed to do. Once, you start setting it up, you start getting the hang of it. Make sure that you create a partition with Win RE on it or Win RE USB flash drive. Win RE was created by Microsoft. It'll make your life so much easier when something screws up your computer. Make a partition so you don't have to go searching for the flash drive. As you restart your computer, you can go into advanced settings and set it so it boots with Win RE rather than Windows 10.

Another cool feature with Macrium Reflect is that with any type of backup image, you can just double click it in Windows 10 and that backup image will suddenly appear as a totally independent new drive like E:\drive. You just double click the drive to open it and all your data is there just exactly how it was on the data that you saved it. Your program files, user folder, files, etc. are all in the same exact spot. You can click on any file and it will open up quickly without any glitches. It's pretty cool when you use it for the first time.

Then, I have another program called Resilio Sync. This creates an instantaneous backup. Every minute, my 1 TB SSD image is synced to a 1 Tb folder with any changes that are made. This prevents me losing a whole day's of work if say the computer crashes. This sounds like overkill but it really does happen relatively often and do you want to redo hours of your work?

Every year, I also make a blu-ray M-Disc of not the entire disc image but data files off the 1Tb SSD. It's formatted in NTFS and all the files are in simple format so that it canprobably be read in 30 years. For example, you shouldn't save files in Word .docx format since it's proprietary and you don't know if Word will be around in 30 years. Microsoft can go dead 10 years from now. Don't save it as a Macrium image either or any other proprietary software but just simple files. It's a lot of work to change all my data into simple formats. To be honest, I'm lazy and actually save my files in Word right now because I like how they are formatted. However, I anticipate that I will have to change the disc whenever the technology changes so I have to be careful to notate what format the files are in on the blu-ray disc label.

Blu-ray M-Discs is predicted to last 1,000 years. The inner part is supposed to last 10,000 years but the outer polycarbonate layer only lasts 1,000 years. It's by far the safest format right now. They have new tech that involve tapes but it's too new. Another non-intuitive point is that you shouldn't encrypt anything on your blu-ray M-Discs or put a password on it. You would think you would want to keep your data safe but if you encrypt it and 30-50 years pass, do you truly think you'll remember where you put the password? It's like a 99% probability that you'll have forgotten it or forgot where you wrote the password. The better thing to do is put the disc in a safe.

Other things to note is that I wouldn't back up my data on sites like Google Drive, Crashplan, etc. You will frequently lose data on those sites and you will never even know it! With Google Drive, for a long time, I would create something and save a batch of files at once. One day, I noticed that some of them would say it saved but I noticed that some of them would simply disappear. I never noticed it and I don't know how long it was going for. And, I don't remember what I lost. I'll never trust them again.

Second, they have clauses in their agreements in which they are allowed to look through your data. They claim it's for research purposes but if you're a business, especially with trade secrets, would you really trust them? If you encrypt the data, they could possibly lose small parts of the data which could lead to losses of huge patches of data. I wouldn't trust them. Never. Remember that a company like Crashplan is not truly one entity. It's consists of a group of people. Even if they have an honest culture, just one bad employee can go rummaging and look through your data. Imagine if they simply got something simple as spreadsheets on the your enormous gross margins you earn on all your vendors' products and they happen to release them. I mean this sometimes happens by mistake when one of your stupid employees emails a spreadsheet with your gross margins to a vendor. They see how much money you are making when they are doing all the work and then next year, they simply go around you and sell directly to the retailer stated on the spreadsheet. (This happens all the time and you never know because nobody says anything, not wanting to get the stupid employee fired.)

blulil87 said:

Thanks. I think I understand now. The problem was that no one (websites, videos) were explaining the ENTIRE process. Something was always left out. If they're going to explain how to backup data, they should also explain how to restore that data. I've yet found anything that thoroughly explains how to use Macrium backup images to restore a dead C drive. But with the explanations here and the bits and pieces I've found elsewhere, I think I understand.

So then, is it recommended to make 2-3 backups on different media, using different software? Can a flash drive be used for a backup? Originally, I was going to use an SSD for the images, but then I heard that an HDD would be better. I was then thinking of using an SSD to make a clone just because it sounds easier to replace a dead drive. But people seem to frown on that and I'm not sure I understand why. I was also thinking of using a flash drive for image backups, but I don't know if that's possible or a good idea.

I realize that any data that's changed from the time I made the clone to the time it's used would be lost. But if any new files are backed up elsewhere, I don't see the problem.

Basically, I have to open my computer to see what's causing an excessive amount of vibration. It's so bad I'm worried the HDD may die. I guess that's why I wanted to make a clone in addition to 2 image backups. I'm anticipating the worst.