Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect  

Silky said:

You're right, I'm so sorry - I was able to create an incremental definition successfully, but it wasn't until I enabled incremental in the retention rules that I got the notice about trial/purchase.

I shoulda known better than to second guess you.

FWIW, there are advantages to doing incrementals & advantages to doing differentials. Differentials take longer to make & use more space than incrementals. However, if you need to restore, they are generally faster than using incrementals. Since I backup every night, but only restore on rare (hopefully) ocassions, I use incrementals.

Macrium Reflect offers the option of doing a "Incrementals forever" with a "synthetic full". A synthetic full consolidates the oldest incremental into the full backup. For example, I have 2 external backup drives. I set them to do a full backup & then keep 7 incrementals. This gives me 2 weeks of daily backups. Another example, if you wanted 2 months of backups on each of your 2 disks and you were rotating them weekly with backups running every day, you'd just set your retention policy to 29. The Full plus those 29 Incrementals is 30 backups, or 4 weeks' worth -- but since each disk is only being used every other week, that allows you to go 8 weeks back in time, with each disk having alternate weeks' backups on it.

But there's only 1 "Full" backup on each drive, taking up much less space.

If you do this, make sure that "Run purge before backup" is unchecked. Otherwise, it will delete your oldest backup before consolidation & you’ll have 1 less incremental if consolidation fails. I've never had a consolidation fail.

Silky said:

Excellent summary. One point of clarification though... the free version does have incremental backups, the paid version offers Incrementals Forever.

No, the Free version has Differentials. The paid for one adds Incrementals. The difference is that a Differential is all the changes since the last Full, so a second differential will be larger than the first (it has to contain all the changes, then some more). The Incremental is only the changes since the last backup, be that a Full, Differential or Incremental. Incrementals can be very small.

The 30-day trial is free and does allow Incrementals, but at the end of the trial it reverts to Free. That can still restore Incrementals, but can no longer make new ones. Perhaps that's what you were thinking of.

phrab said:

FWIW, there are advantages to doing incrementals & advantages to doing differentials. Differentials take longer to make & use more space than incrementals. However, if you need to restore, they are generally faster than using incrementals. Since I backup every night, but only restore on rare (hopefully) ocassions, I use incrementals.

Macrium Reflect offers the option of doing a "Incrementals forever" with a "synthetic full". A synthetic full consolidates the oldest incremental into the full backup. For example, I have 2 external backup drives. I set them to do a full backup & then keep 7 incrementals. This gives me 2 weeks of daily backups. Another example, if you wanted 2 months of backups on each of your 2 disks and you were rotating them weekly with backups running every day, you'd just set your retention policy to 29. The Full plus those 29 Incrementals is 30 backups, or 4 weeks' worth -- but since each disk is only being used every other week, that allows you to go 8 weeks back in time, with each disk having alternate weeks' backups on it.

But there's only 1 "Full" backup on each drive, taking up much less space.

If you do this, make sure that "Run purge before backup" is unchecked. Otherwise, it will delete your oldest backup before consolidation & you’ll have 1 less incremental if consolidation fails. I've never had a consolidation fail.

My backup strategy is intended to have 15 days of incremental forever (with Synth full enabled) and a Full backup twice a month retaining 2 files, one month of data. Full backups go to a USB HDD and daily's go to a dedicated internal. So I've been using full/incr forever and no differentials.

Clearly you have a deeper understanding of backup strategies than I do - I got lost after the second sentence in the second paragraph. You have two external backup drives - these are destinations for backup images, right? You set them to do a full backup... If they're destination drives, how are you setting them? I don't know if I've lost the plot or it's a terminology thing.

That said, it was a great tip about unchecking purge before when running inc forever. Thanks for that.

Silky said:

My backup strategy is intended to have 15 days of incremental forever (with Synth full enabled) and a Full backup twice a month retaining 2 files, one month of data. Full backups go to a USB HDD and daily's go to a dedicated internal. So I've been using full/incr forever and no differentials.

Clearly you have a deeper understanding of backup strategies than I do - I got lost after the second sentence in the second paragraph. You have two external backup drives - these are destinations for backup images, right? You set them to do a full backup... If they're destination drives, how are you setting them? I don't know if I've lost the plot or it's a terminology thing.

That said, it was a great tip about unchecking purge before when running inc forever. Thanks for that.

Sorry for being unclear, but I'll try to clear it up with images. Your system is perfectly fine. I actually have 2 backups per night. One of them alternates weekly between 2 external drives, D & E. The other is a full+30 incrementals to a thumbdrive, which I remove every morning & put it in before I go to bed. So if anything happens to my computer or attached external drives, I can still do a restore from the thumb drives.

Here's how I set up my full backup with 7 incrementals, the oldest of which gets consolidated into the full on each external drive.

Here is my Synthetic Full + 7 incrementals listed. Notice that my retention is set for 7 incrementals & is scheduled daily for 3:00AM.



Here, you see that I picked my destination drive as E.



If I click the down arrow on the folder list, you'll see that an alternative is D...my other external drive. I use the same definition file for both Drive D & E. Since only 1 is plugged in at a time (changed weekly), Reflect simply uses whichever drive is available.


If you click the down arrow on the "Select a template for your backup plan", you'll see this list. I chose the 2nd from the bottom, "Incremental backup set". You'll see that it's description is 1 full backup, followed by incrementals (of which I chose to retain 7). That means that whenever that drive is connected, the oldest backup is consolidated into the full (hence the name synthetic), & then it's purged after a new incremental is created.



Now you'll see that the backup is to Drive D, but the alternative is Drive E. Note that to have both drives listed, they should BOTH be connected before starting Reflect & before you create your backup template. Otherwise, Reflect can't find the alternative drive.


Hope this is clearer!

Everybody's strategy will be different. I make full images weekly, and incrementals more when I install stuff for testing e.g. I make image backup before, and one after. I recently installed Acronid, then AOMEI, Then Easeus,aking incrementals. That way I could wind forwards or backwards.
This way as I wind backwards, each test version is COMPLETELY removed.

So I use incrementals like restore points.

I never use incrementals for ever, as I never found any need for it.

Matthew Wai said:

I never use disk imaging, as I never found any need for it.
A wise user would never behave like me.

I am glad you qualified your statement.

Of course, the most important thing is backing up critical data. I assume you do that!

Ultimately, image backups are not essential provided critical data is backed up.

However, they save a lot of time in getting pc back to a working state if hard drive fails. It would take me several days to get pc back to fully working state (lots of apps to reinstall, settings to change etc). With a backup, I can be up and running again in less than an hour (I always have a spare hdd available for emergencies).

This is especially critical for me in these COVID working from home days.

Matthew Wai said:

Of course, I do that. Even if I don't, the data partition will remain unchanged after I have clean installed Windows in the unallocated space before the data partition.

But if disk dies. you are out of it all. That is my primary concern.