Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect  

Hoosier Daddy said:

Sort of a side question, but I'm still confused about why Macrium only mentions RD related to Clone and Restore but not Backup. I don't see any reason it couldn't apply to backups and since backups are done many many many more times than restores, why RD isn't mentioned for Backup. Is it an oversight, or they use some other term that means the same with Backup, or there is something so different between Clone and Backup that makes RD possible for Clone but not for Backup?

I am very concerned about the lifespan of the SSDs. When only a few bytes of a file are changed, restoring just the blocks that changed as opposed to the entire file would make a massive difference in the lifespan of the SSD.

RDR - Rapid Delta Restore. The clue is in the name. It's the restore equivalent of Incremental or Differential backups.

I don't think I would worry about SSD lifespan. Leave some free space and enjoy.

I've had an ssd running as boot system disk for at least four years and it is still going strong.

Hoosier Daddy said:

Sort of a side question, but I'm still confused about why Macrium only mentions RD related to Clone and Restore but not Backup. I don't see any reason it couldn't apply to backups and since backups are done many many many more times than restores, why RD isn't mentioned for Backup. Is it an oversight, or they use some other term that means the same with Backup, or there is something so different between Clone and Backup that makes RD possible for Clone but not for Backup?

I am very concerned about the lifespan of the SSDs. When only a few bytes of a file are changed, restoring just the blocks that changed as opposed to the entire file would make a massive difference in the lifespan of the SSD.

The backup portion of MR uses compression after it has determined what needs to be backed up. In the case of a Full backup, it is all blocks, with no regard to the actual files or file content. Compression is normally in the 60% range, depending on the data. For an Incremental or Differential, it first determines what blocks have changed, and only compresses and backs up them. There is no Rapid Delta involved in the Backup process. Only the compression and/or the changed data for incremental/differential are used to speed things up. RD comes into play during Restore when it compares the index of saved blocks to existing blocks and restores only the changed ones.

Hope this helps to explain a little. The Rapid only pertains to the Restore operation.

f14tomcat said:

The backup portion of MR uses compression after it has determined what needs to be backed up. In the case of a Full backup, it is all blocks, with no regard to the actual files or file content. Compression is normally in the 60% range, depending on the data. For an Incremental or Differential, it first determines what blocks have changed, and only compresses and backs up them. There is no Rapid Delta involved in the Backup process. Only the compression and/or the changed data for incremental/differential are used to speed things up. RD comes into play during Restore when it compares the index of saved blocks to existing blocks and restores only the changed ones.

Hope this helps to explain a little. The Rapid only pertains to the Restore operation.

And if you think about it a clone is a backup and restore combined. The RDR determines which blocks are cloned.

I wouldn't worry about SSD endurance, they are quite long lived nowadays. I have 6 years old one which I used a lot for experimenting and it has several times more writes than it was predicted to last, it's still working as new. I'm still backing up to HDDs though but that's only because large SSDs are still relatively expensive and I have bunch of large HDDs.

Bree said:

To backup an SSD you are reading from it, so no endurance worries there. It's only writes that reduce the lifespan, you can read from them as many times as you want..

There is an equivalent process for backups, it's called Macrium Reflect Changed Block Tracker (MRCBT). This is Premium feature, not enabled in Free. It speeds up the backup for differentials or incrementals.

Macrium Changed Block Tracker - KnowledgeBase v7.2 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

One of these days I must get back to testing that again now that it survives across sessions. Was no good for anyone who shuts down frequently before.

If you buy contacts Sales and see if they have any sales on or if they are prepared to offer a discount. That is how I bought mine. On a number of occasion they have offered 20%.

Back on Black Friday they had a 50% discount running. Maybe we see a similar sale at Christmas.