Couple of Nooby questions about Macrium Reflect

You will get most likely a lot of different methods on how to use Macrium Reflect. That being said, this is how I do mine.:)

I always make my Rescue disk on a USB stick formatted Fat. This way if you can't boot into your Windows 10, you can always boot from your bootable rescue usb drive. Then access your external drive and restore one of your image backups. CD's and DVD's are a die'n breed. You only need a 4GB USB stick, cost about 6 dollars or less.

Your Rescue Media should be updated with every new update released from Macrium Reflect. Everyday when you startup MR it automatically checks for New Updates, and will tell you. We also post new update information on here too.

I never make differential backups, I always make complete image backups, you can mount your complete image backup later if you want and pick out anything files of folders and just restore what you choose too. I think differential backups are a waste of time. Clicking on one of your image backups will temporarily assign it a drive letter on your Windows 10. showing you all your files and folders. When you are done, all you do then is just Unmount that drive.

Hope this helps you understand how Macrium works a little better. Take Care, Mike. :)

SoFine409 said:

I have a different opinion about differential backups. One of my PCs has 156 GB of programs/data so making frequent full image backups is way too time consuming, taking about 2 hours including verifying. I also don't want to go too long between backups in case something goes wrong like a wonky MS update, hardware failure, or ransomware. So I make a full image backup once every two weeks or so and then at the end of each day I run a differential backup. Usually that takes only a few minutes unless of course I made major changes like installing a new piece of software and then I do a full image. This keeps me safe without consuming too much time. Of course everyone needs to design a backup strategy that suits how the use thier PC and their tolerance for risk.

No offense intended SoFine, but on both my computers, a complete image backup and verify takes no more than 5 to 6 mins. I do have Samsung SSD's on both thou.

. Can the Rescue Media I create using MR, be saved onto the same External drive where I will save both my System Image and my File History back up? Or does the Rescue Media need to be saved onto a seperate USB or CD/DVD?

Yes. Create a separate partition on the external about 512KB, format as FAT32, set it as Active. Next create an ISO rescue then extract the content with WinRar/Winzip/7-zip.
FYI: Setup Macrium Rescue to boot from an Internal/External USB HD/SSD

2. When does this Rescue Media need to be updated? How will I know when to do it? What is the trigger?

Normally whenever a new update version of Macrium, create another ISO in step 1, unzip it to overwrite the previous version.

3. In regard to creating a Full Backup Image; I know the free version will allow differential back ups. So I guess I will have a large file (Original Full Backup) followed by several differential back ups?

Depend how you set up your Windows. Personally, I only have Windows 10 on a SSD, no data/Documents/Videos/Music etc... so the backup process only takes around 2 minutes 30 seconds, not enough time for me to make a cup of coffee. With new version 7, the restore process takes under 1 minutes.

Youse guys got to be kidding me about full image backups only taking a few minutes. Exactly how much occupied byte-space is your OS partition and same question about your Data partition.

It takes me about 10 minutes to backup about 110GB of SSD to HDD, resulting .mrimg files is about 30% smaller that total of SSD's usage. Size and times vary of course but this is my average. Process doesn't take much of resources so it's actually "Fire and forget" and can also be set to shut computer down when finished. Perfect for end of day backup, start it and go elsewhere and it will turn everything off by itself. No need to sit and look at it, I can do other work while it runs.