Macrium Reflect 8 Update Discussion

AMDMan2016 said:

Interesting, Will start including my Game SSD, and Data Drive in addition to the Boot M.2 Drive. And See if i can free up space on a second external to store backups as well, and switch between Seagate 8TB, and probably 1-2TB drive, sadly don't have another 4TB-8TB as yet

Imaging is not the best solution for data drives. If you want to stay with MR for it then there is the File & Folder backup which you can tailor to backup the files you need. I personally use another program FreeFileSync which is essentially a file copy program.

Interesting Keith. Why is Imaging not a good option for data?

Caledon Ken said:

Interesting Keith. Why is Imaging not a good option for data?

Imaging images a whole partition so you get all your data combined up into one massive backup file. Digging through that to retrieve a file is cumbersome. With an F&F backup you can have separate backups for different types of data and keep them quite small. If you are sticking with MR then incremental backups built on a synthetic full backup works well. As I mentioned I use FreeFileSync which is essentially a file copy type of system which keeps the backup in sync with the master data. It also supports versioning. It's only real issue is you have to manually clean up old data every so often if you use versioning. It's fast too. My daily backup scans approximately 250,000 files and synchronises the changes in a minute or so.

Okay. I just mount the image and it looks just like my data drive in terms of folder structure. Easy to navigate.


I do like the idea of File sync.

Caledon Ken said:

Okay. I just mount the image and it looks just like my data drive in terms of folder structure. Easy to navigate.

I do like the idea of File sync.

Another option is OneDrive, (5 GB comes with Windows 10). You can back up data there too.

Turn On or Off OneDrive PC Folder Backup Protection in Windows 10

Also, if you have a subscription to Microsoft (or Office) 365, you get 1 TB storage for each installation.

Yes that is an option Wynona but at 300GB of data I'm reluctant.

Wynona said:

Another option is OneDrive, (5 GB comes with Windows 10). You can back up data there too.

Turn On or Off OneDrive PC Folder Backup Protection in Windows 10

Also, if you have a subscription to Microsoft (or Office) 365, you get 1 TB storage for each installation.

I also use OneDrive. I have gathered 40GB of free storage there over the years, also Google Backup & Sync which I have 19GB, and Adobe Creative Cloud which has 20GB with my Photoshop subscription.

Wynona said:

Another option is OneDrive, (5 GB comes with Windows 10). You can back up data there too.

Turn On or Off OneDrive PC Folder Backup Protection in Windows 10

Also, if you have a subscription to Microsoft (or Office) 365, you get 1 TB storage for each installation.

The restriction there is it only backs up Desktop, Documents and Pictures. The libraries entries. You would need to have all your data nested under one of them to get backed up by this option. Not easy to do for data on an separate drives, i.e. E: as an HDD.

It is a bit harsh saying that imaging is not good for data, but whether it is the best is debatable. There are pluses and minuses. On the minus side, it can take a long time to backup using (say) Macrium Reflect Free (assuming data is on different drive). On the plus side, the backup will take less space and you can mount inage to extract files (basically a fancy zip drive).

With the paid version, the use of incrementals is basically same as any filesync package.

TBH, I copy very critical data to usb hard drive AND usb drive, fairly critical data to one drive, and manually copy relatively non critical data to a usb hard drive ( mostly videos as they take a lot of space and most I can redownload anyway).

The point is each person has to devise a backup stategy that suits them, and they should categorise data to suit them. There is not really a 'one size fits all' solution.