Clever Macrium Reflect

f14tomcat said:

One minor clarification. When doing an image backup, Macrium backs up sectors (Macrium refers to them as clusters...one or more consecutive sectors (512 bytes each), not individual files. Only the NTFS metadata is backed up. During a RDR, it looks for sectors that have changed, and restores them, not the individual files. Theoretically (improbable, really), if all your work involved making small changes to small files all in the same sector, you could have made hundreds of changes, and the RDR would only need to restore that one sector. Restore time of about a second or two! :) Does not apply, of course, to Files and Folders backup, least I don't think it does. I think the RDR is only for image backups.....may be wrong, correct if I am.

It's a pretty clever and nifty approach, and works great.

I was aware of this, I was just being simplistic in my explanation to show principle. IMO, it is worth buying Home just to get RDR.

RolandJS said:

f14tomcat, thanks, I'm well on my way to making usb and dvd boots of MR7, and will be trying incremental and/or differential backups along with my normal full images ("parallel backups").

I have an SSD as my C drive (holding my programs as well of course) I don't bother with incremental or dif. backups. My setup makes a full Macrium image automatically every day of the SSD, keeping a total of 7 rolling images, each about 27 GB,the oldest being deleted each day. Monday, Wed., Friday backups are saved on one partition of an ext. USB HD, and Tues., Thurs., Sat. and Sunday are saved on a partition on another ext. USB HD.

Stevekir said:

I have an SSD as my C drive (holding my programs as well of course) I don't bother with incremental or dif. backups. My setup makes a full Macrium image automatically every day of the SSD, keeping a total of 7 rolling images, each about 27 GB,the oldest being deleted each day. Monday, Wed., Friday backups are saved on one partition of an ext. USB HD, and Tues., Thurs., Sat. and Sunday are saved on a partition on another ext. USB HD.

Wow that is a very robust strategy but does seem be rather overkill to me.

I would have thought a weekly backup with daily differential backups would be perfectly adequate, a lot faster, use less resources, and use much less storage. Also less wear and tear on external drives.

You could also simply set up a scheduled task to copy backups from one external drive to another?

Still, in the end, your strategy cannot be faulted from a robustness point of view.

Of course, a truly super robust strategy also would require image backups with an alternative tool in case of common mode failure of Macrium. However, that would be mega rare.

You do not say where you keep data - if on same drive, images just tend to grow and grow. Assuming you keep data in second drive, how do you backup that data?

Yes, it is overkill, but I don't notice the backups being made, and they don't seem to slow me down, and I have a lot ofexternal storage (it is quite cheap now).

My data (Documents, Music, etc.) are on the 2 TB internal HDD (Drive d) that came with the computer. I use FreeFileSync to make periodic backups, and about every ten days I make a manual copy (with FreeFileSync) of that backup to one of the external USB drive after copying that USB backup drive to thee other, so I have three backups of the D drive: current, recent, a couple of weeks ago. Wow!

I also have a Macrium rescue Media DVD which takes me to whichever of the ext. USB backups I choose!