Scheduling Macrium Reflect Backups

A comment first on scheduled backup. Normally to run 'invisibly' that requires the backup medium to be connected to the PC.
This has two potential effects.
a. The lifetime of the backup medium might be reduced (compared to connecting it only when required)
b. The backup data could potentially be corrupted (e.g. by power surge, ransomware..)
Macrium has a paid feature which can help with (b).

Now consider additional possibilites:
a. You could configure a System Restore point to be created on schedule e.g. daily. There's a tutorial on how to do that.
Now some decry SR- correct, it can fail when restoring just when you need it.
But it's great when it does work and unlike restoring an image does not affect your data on the system partition.

b. For certain fast-changing critical data consider having some separate means of backing that up- e.g. selective synchronised backup. There are various programs which do that- and Windows does have File History, although expereinces of that are variable.

I have Macrium to run a Full backup on the 1st of every month, Differential every Monday & an Incremental every day except Weekends.

dusty2 said:

After recovering without the benefit of backups, I want to do this right.

I am a casual home computer user with no business related activity. I have files like Excel, Word, Sketchup, etc. (no gaming).

I now have Macrium schedule for a Full every two weeks and an Incremental every week day. Is this adequate or should I have Differential backups scheduled too?

Should I alter the schedule in any other manner?

There is no right or wrong solution.

Personally, I would say a full once a week plus 6 incrementals (one per day) is more manageable. A chain of 13 incrementals is quite long.

In all probability if you need to do a restore, it will probably be in the last few days. You will find it hard to remember the changes in previous week.

I do not see point in mixing differentials and incrementals. It all comes down to your confidence in incremental chains. The problem with incrementals is if an incremental is deleted or gets corrupted, you can only recover up to the broken/lost incremental.

However if a diff breaks, you lose everything since last full.

I have never had an incremental fail but if you do a full once a week, your maximum risk is 7 days.

Personally, I think you should do incrementals or differentials but don't mix them. Others will have different opinions. In the end, there are pluses and minuses in any strategy.

Main reason I prefer incrementals is they are a lot more space efficient.

Only you can assess the best schedule to suit you.

dusty2 said:

Are all three included in the free download? It seems as though I can do only Full and Incremental (which I have done).

No. Reflect Free includes Full and Differential backups. Incremental backup is a Premium feature and is only in the paid-for version.

A Differential image contains all the changes since the Full image. To restore a Differential you need just two images, the Differential image and the Full image it refers to.

An Incremental contains the changes since the last image, whether that was a Full, Differential, or Incremental image. The usual practice is to make a Full image, then follow that with a succession of Incrementals. To restore an Incremental image you need the Full image and all subsequent Incrementals up to the one you wish to restore.

Free will let you try Premium features for a 30 day Trial, after which it will prompt you to purchase Reflect Home. If you decline it will revert to the Free version.

Please explain what you mean by "don't mix them".

While there is nothing to stop you making a Full, followed by a mix of Incremental and Differential images, it's going to be horribly confusing to keep track of which ones you need to keep in order to be able to do a successful restore. Best to stick to just using one type, either differential of Incremental, until the next Full.

MaloK said:

At some point when thing gets bigger you may want to separate OS and Data to have the smallest boot image possible to backup / restore and use other means to do with data.

My faith in Terrabitous images is not really good since one bad sector can ruin the whole party.

File sync software becomes quickly a more viable solution.

But still I like to do them manually when I know things are good... 7 backups of a corrupted file is not a backup.

I am a 100% advocate of this approach.

In my case, I image backup C drive, but use File and Folder backup for data (paid version of reflect) .

dusty2 said:

I have altered my backup schedule.

I have scheduled a Full every Monday and an Incremental every week day.

I may edit this when I finally convert to a paid version of Macrium.

You can only do differentials on free version (unless doing 30 day trial of paid version).