New Macrium Reflect Updates

Clintlgm said:

I use incrementals for daily back ups, differentials weekly and full monthly. I also if planning anything big like changing hardware, upgrading windows will create a full C:\ SSD Image.

All my backup are verified, I have the time for that.

Forever incrementals just don't sound like a very good Idea to me, too many things can happen and they do to all of us.

More or less what I was saying except with your approach you end up with 30 or so incrementals each month - with incrementals forever you would only get 7 but could not roll back say 10 days. Pluses and minuses I suppose.

I do a full back up about every other day unless I have an install or update. It only takes about 4.5 minutes.

cereberus said:

In this respect, differentials have a higher integrity inasmuch as each is self contained i.e. they are not chained like incrementals. Of course differentials grow as time goes on.

I guess the same is true with incrementals forever to an extent as the first "merged incremental" is effectively a differential file, and as time progresses it must grow but all subsequent incrementals in the "forever" chain will be lean and mean.

As I said earlier it seems to me (for me) a good strategy is Full monthly with 7 daily "incrementals for ever" and a weekly differential as a secondary backup.

Has anybody here ever actually used Synthetic Fulls. This seems to be more risky to me in terms of integrity?

I have, as a trial, on a file and folder backup for a period of several months. For me it worked as advertised but I share your doubts as to it's use in the long term.

Josey Wales said:

I do a full back up about every other day unless I have an install or update. It only takes about 4.5 minutes.

Poweful CPU, SSD, lean and mean OS?

I can do around 40GB in 10 minutes or so at best.

Incrementals are so quick. As I have said before, and similar to another poster (@F14TomCat) I use them as restore points really. With Rapid Delta Restore, they blitz on conventional restore points!

reddice said:

Is incremental less reliable than a full backup? Incremental backups is the only thing I might use if upgrading to the pro version.

You've gotten several replies from several members, all valid, all factual, and all worth trying. Bottom line....the important thing is to have a good backup plan, understand your backup process, feel comfortable with it, and use it...regularly. Alternating different external drives, if possible.

Incremental backups are not worth it then. It only takes about 2 minutes to do a full backup and about 10 minutes to restore it. I also back my images up on a external 1GB drive manually every few days.

reddice said:

Incremental backups are not worth it then. It only takes about 2 minutes to do a full backup and about 10 minutes to restore it. I also back my images up on a external 1GB drive manually every few days.

A 1GB external drive? You mean 1 TB by any chance?

Wynona said:

A 1GB external drive? You mean 1 TB by any chance?

Yes sorry 1TB.

reddice said:

Incremental backups are not worth it then. It only takes about 2 minutes to do a full backup and about 10 minutes to restore it. I also back my images up on a external 1GB drive manually every few days.

Good. Looks like you're good to go.

reddice said:

Incremental backups are not worth it then. It only takes about 2 minutes to do a full backup and about 10 minutes to restore it. I also back my images up on a external 1GB drive manually every few days.

You must have a powerful pc and not much in OS drive to do full backup in 2 minutes.