I rarely use incremental backups any more.

OldNavy said:

I have a weekly full backup and daily differential backups as they are easier to revert to than a series of incremental backups.

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Just out of curiosity, how is that any easier? You point to the backup you want to restore and that's it regardless of whether that backup is full, differential, or incremental.

TraderGary said:

I follow the widely embraced 3-2-1 backup strategy.

3 copies of my data
2 different backup technologies
1 copy must always be offsite

I'm self-employed, work from home, and my data is vitally important to me.

Every evening I make two Macrium Reflect images on two 4TB Samsung Portable SSD's each containing 7 rotating daily images. The SSD's are only connected for the short time it takes to make an image which is currently averaging only 5 minutes. I make the images while I am working in the evening.

I work entirely from my local 1 Terabyte C: Drive and all my data and photos are kept in my OneDrive folder. I'm a Microsoft 365 subscriber which includes 1 Terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage. I have OneDrive set to mirror my local OneDrive folder, thus I always have all my work backed up throughout the day in real-time as I work. This is very important to me. I don't ever want to lose anything I'm working on.

That's it. 321. Three separate copies of my data using Two different technologies. One copy is always offsite in cloud OneDrive and updated in real-time.

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My data isn't business critical but it's important to me!
My Macrium backup is just the system drive - my personal files are on a separate SSD. This contains my OneDrive folder so anything I save gets sent to the cloud straight away

As well as the cloud save I make a files backup every 3 days using Macrium and an external drive.
On ANOTHER external drive (which is offline unless I connect it), I use the old MS SyncToy program to backup my OneDrive folder

Can never be too careful!
The best backup is the one you never need to use...

TraderGary said:

@cereberus Would you consider updating your "My Computer"? I would love to see your updated laptop specs.

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updated - good mid range spec - got it on Amazon Prime Day at £900 (£300 off). Overall comes out at 60th quartile on Passmark but that was dragged down by 3D graphics which I rarely use. Really it is the CPU and NVME that make it quite powerful for a laptop.

I have to make sure I run it on a stand for ventialtion as it can get quite hot otherwise.

For me, the key to drive imaging was properly organizing my hard drive in the first place.

Instead of putting everything on my "C:\" drive, I put Windows (which over the years has been occasionally screwed up by some errant driver, OEM update or virus) as well as Linux (which almost never fails to boot) on one physical NVMe drive separate from the 50 or so programs and hundreds of documents I have on a second drive on my PC. I image the OS drive once a week (about 8GB in size). This makes it far less likely that I will loose documents, videos or other data. In addition, imaging the OS and restoring it is far faster than also backing it up with a bunch of apps like Microsoft Office (which can be as much as 2GB on its own) and other space hogging programs that hardly change at all from day to day and are not likely to get corrupted by an errant driver or computer virus.

Froggie said:

A DATA point if interested... the test I ran recently (last week for another thread elsewhere), had a 49.9gB OS partition full image on REFLECT (25.3-sec) and HASLEO (27.2-sec) run at MEDIUM compression... the HIGH compression was almost identical (1-sec difference at about 24-sec). This was done on a 10th gen i7 running 16-threads, runnning from different SOURCE and TARGET NvMEs.

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I really cannot emulate such results (on a proportional basis) for Hasleo.

13th Gen i9 on laptop powered.

50 GB to backup.

MRH - 1 min 02 secs (medium compression, high speed)
Aoemi - 1 min 17 secs (medium compression, high speed
Hasleo - 2 mins 24 secs (medium compression).

I could not find a high speed option for Hasleo.

I also find high compression mode hardly makes any difference.

cereberus said:

updated - good mid range spec - got it on Amazon Prime Day at £900 (£300 off). Overall comes out at 60th quartile on Passmark but that was dragged down by 3D graphics which I rarely use. Really it is the CPU and NVME that make it quite powerful for a laptop.

I have to make sure I run it on a stand for ventialtion as it can get quite hot otherwise.

Click to expand...

You've got very noticeable power under the hood. Gotta love it!

I see your ASUS Zenbook 14 has the dedicated CoPilot key. So does my Dell XPS 16. When I ordered it, I was wishing I could configure it without that key, but now that I have it, I find that I'm using it all the time. It beats using Google/Bing and then searching through the results by a country mile!

TraderGary said:

You've got very noticeable power under the hood. Gotta love it!

I see your ASUS Zenbook 14 has the dedicated CoPilot key. So does my Dell XPS 16. When I ordered it, I was wishing I could configure it without that key, but now that I have it, I find that I'm using it all the time. It beats using Google/Bing and then searching through the results by a country mile!

Click to expand...

Not my Zenbook - probably why it had a good discount to get rid of older stock. Not interested in copilot.

cereberus said:

I really cannot emulate such results (on a proportional basis) for Hasleo.

13th Gen i9 on laptop powered.

50 GB to backup.

MRH - 1 min 02 secs (medium compression, high speed)
Aoemi - 1 min 17 secs (medium compression, high speed
Hasleo - 2 mins 24 secs (medium compression).

I could not find a high speed option for Hasleo.

I also find high compression mode hardly makes any difference.

Click to expand...

@cereberus - you should run that Hasleo test again, and while it's running, fire up TASK MANAGER and look at that single disk (if both SOURCE and TARGET partitions are on it)... you may see the "Active Time" graph near saturation.

Froggie said:

@cereberus - you should run that Hasleo test again, and while it's running, fire up TASK MANAGER and look at that single disk (if both SOURCE and TARGET partitions are on it)... you may see the "Active Time" graph near saturation.

Click to expand...

How does that help? Can I influence it?

No influence. If your "Active Time" on that disk was near 100%, that's why your backup time was so slow with Hasleo. Hasleo will grab every core (E or P) and every available thread when it runs, with an i9, this may really saturate your disk queue and cause it to slow down.

I don't think REFLECT will attack your processor in the same way...

pparks1 said:

For me, these days it would be pictures, videos, documents that I have created as well as any licensed software and associated keys. Years ago, it would have also included things like email, bookmarks and music.

I don't backup daily, I backup every couple of months. My data is mostly on OneDrive these days, so it's on my PC as well as in the cloud. My email is all in Gmail. My music is all pretty much in Amazon Music, and my bookmarks are all in my Google account. All of my pics and videos from my phone always goes to OneDrive directly, so if my phone is lost, stolen, damaged or misplaced, I don't lose anything.

I've never actually had to restore my actual workstation from a backup. I have however restored test machines that i use exclusively to test different scenarios, operating systems, etc.

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Its perhaps a use of system type thing, I don't have anything on here that i couldn't live without, No pictures etc or music, mainly on my handset for that, Mainly games movies etc etc on the pc. Might just be i have no use for it as nothing is valuable, Guess its different for others!

FYI i understand why people back up for sure, i just never understood the daily or everytime a program is installed lets do a full backup type thing, Guess if you're installing some dodgy programs or a sheer volume of normal ones then i kinda get it but still. Cant remember the last time i installed a program and required a backup and im not that anal about it, i know whats safe and what isn't.
Yes things like windows updates can crap some beds for sure so if on insider path then i guess thats plus 1 for backup for sure.

cereberus said:

Since I upgraded my laptop, it full backs up my OS + apps C drive (around 50 GB) in 1 minute to my NVME drive using Macrium Reflect Home.

I find incrementals now save hardly any time anymore, so I have pretty much stopped using them.

Click to expand...

antspants said:

I only do full backups.

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I have lost my interest in differentials and incrementals, because on my i7 9th gen, my MRH imaging times are insignificant for full images from NVMe to NVMe. I have nothing but Windows and Google Chrome on my C: (well, and the small stuff that various apps dump into the User folder; nothing I can do about that), all my programs (@35) and data (insignificant) on D:, and C: and D: are on the same NVMe. The backup target is a separate NVMe internal, and I periodically copy the older images from that internal to an external, connected by USB and disconnected when the copies are made and checked. Then I wipe the older (copied) images from the internal storage disk. Here's what my loggged times look like for recent full images, made and verified:

Froggie said:

No influence. If your "Active Time" on that disk was near 100%, that's why your backup time was so slow with Hasleo. Hasleo will grab every core (E or P) and every available thread when it runs, with an i9, this may really saturate your disk queue and cause it to slow down.

I don't think REFLECT will attack your processor in the same way...

Click to expand...

My Hasleo active time was around 40% and fairly constant between 35 to 45% and was writing at around 250 MB/S.

MRH clocked in at around 75% and was writing at around 500 MB/S.

hsehestedt said:

Just out of curiosity, how is that any easier? You point to the backup you want to restore and that's it regardless of whether that backup is full, differential, or incremental.

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hsehestedt,
If i understand it correctly a differential backup is slower to take but faster to restore.
The incremental backup is faster to take but there are more steps to restore.
Both work well in Macrium thankfully.

cereberus said:

My Hasleo active time was around 40% and fairly constant between 35 to 45% and was writing at around 250 MB/S.

MRH clocked in at around 75% and was writing at around 500 MB/S.

Click to expand...

There's definitely something unusual about your hardware configuration. When I do a FULL Hasleo OS partition backup (appx. 50gB), the read speed on the OS disk runs 1.3-1.5gB/s and the "Active Time" on the disk is about 75-85%... this with the SOURCE & TARGET disks separate and each being PCiE v3 at about a max rate of 3.4gB/sec.

I have no idea why Hasleo would be that slow (250mB/s) on your System.

Froggie said:

There's definitely something unusual about your hardware configuration. When I do a FULL Hasleo OS partition backup (appx. 50gB), the read speed on the OS disk runs 1.3-1.5gB/s and the "Active Time" on the disk is about 75-85%... this with the SOURCE & TARGET disks separate and each being PCiE v3 at about a max rate of 3.4gB/sec.

I have no idea why Hasleo would be that slow (250mB/s) on your System.

Click to expand...

Thanks anyway.

Froggie said:

There's definitely something unusual about your hardware configuration. When I do a FULL Hasleo OS partition backup (appx. 50gB), the read speed on the OS disk runs 1.3-1.5gB/s and the "Active Time" on the disk is about 75-85%... this with the SOURCE & TARGET disks separate and each being PCiE v3 at about a max rate of 3.4gB/sec.

I have no idea why Hasleo would be that slow (250mB/s) on your System.

Click to expand...

This is weird - I ran Hasleo 4.9.1 on my older 11th gen i7 laptop and it took 1 min 11 secs for pretty much same backup (new laptop was clone of old one) - only difference it was from one internal nvme to 2nd internal nvme.

New 13th gen i9 laptop was from one partition to another on same drive (I do back up to external usb as well).

So maybe Hasleo does not handle backing up to same drive taking twice as long. Maybe it cannot read and write efficiently when on same physical drive?

@Froggie - is this something you can test?

Sure! When using the same physical disk, the "Active Time" for that disk in TaskMgr went way up over 95% (which is what should happen) and the disk READ bandwidth varied between 500mB/s and 1.2gB/s with the WRITE bandwidth doing the same types of things.

This is what I thought would happen if you were using the same device for SOURCE & TARGET. Also, the CPU utilization drops quite a bit as the single storage device becomes the more limiting factor.

This is not a Hasleo issue (it only knows about partitions, doesn't care where they're located). Why Macrium does a better job... no idea.

Froggie said:

Sure! When using the same physical disk, the "Active Time" for that disk in TaskMgr went way up over 95% (which is what should happen) and the disk READ bandwidth varied between 500mB/s and 1.2gB/s with the WRITE bandwidth doing the same types of things.

This is what I thought would happen if you were using the same device for SOURCE & TARGET. Also, the CPU utilization drops quite a bit as the single storage device becomes the more limiting factor.

This is not a Hasleo issue (it only knows about partitions, doesn't care where they're located). Why Macrium does a better job... no idea.

Click to expand...

To really muddy the waters, MRH is slower than Hasleo on my older 2 drives laptop.

I cannot see a consistent pattern.

Sometimes Life is a Beach and then you Fry.

Edit:
Just backed to a second partition on NVME containing the OS rather than 2nd drive on older laptop and the backup took nearly twice as long as backing up to second drive.

I guess this proves Hasleo is more efficient when using two drives.

Like you I have no idea why MRH is much faster on my new laptop than Hasleo but hey I'll take the win LOL as MRH is my main tool.

cereberus said:

Since I upgraded my laptop, it full backs up my OS + apps C drive (around 50 GB) in 1 minute to my NVME drive using Macrium Reflect Home.

I only ever keep last 3 backups to save space.

I find incrementals now save hardly any time anymore, so I have pretty much stopped using them.

For reasons I cannot fully explain, Macrium Reflect Home now backups much faster than any other package I have recently tested on new laptop (Hasleo, Aomei, Easeus) which take around 2+ minutes.

As an aside, I double checked the MRH backup was sound using Macrium Viboot.

I think the reason MRH backups are much faster is because my more powerful I9 CPU handles the MRH multithreading much better (free version does not have multi-threading). I do not know if the other packages use multi-threading.

Click to expand...

With a decent 7200 classical 14TB "spinner" I just backup the entire Windows vhdx file to the device -- My windows whether VM or "physical" are always on vhdx files so just dumping the last 3 (My windows installs are typically around 25 - 35 GB) to this HDD i won't give me a disk space problem.

Critical data I need I just send to the cloud - in over 3 years of using some cloud facilities I've never had a problem accessing data and the chance of both Internet and the 4/5G phone system being out at the same time is just about zero -- if that happens then I suspect you'd have a lot more problems to contend with than lack of access to your data.

Most phones have sufficient size internal storage / other facilities to access cloud servers and retrieve data and send to PC if required or simply store internally. 5G speeds can be hugely faster than traditional "copper wired" provided ISP's still not on full fibre.

For local data backup / archive I use rsync as it has decent options for only backing up changed / new data which is quite useful.

BTW any Linux distro uses the full multithreading of an appropriate CPU --it's built in to the kernel rather than the application . The linux command simply just offloads the i/o requests to the kernel rather than let the application do "direct i/o" -- more secure too as a potential hacker would need to get access at privilege level to the internal kernel I/O subsystem -- not so easy.

I think Windows via dism FFU commands also will use full multi threading capability of any appropriate CPU so backups based on that if purely on Windows would be worth investigating IMO. Not sure though how that works in practice.

In any case if you choose the appropriate times to backup data I'm not really sure why the time is so important -- unless you have huge windows partitions -- one should keep the OS lean and mean and store userdata elsewhere in any case -- I've been doing that since XP days.

What though is needed on any OS is a decent "Cataloguing" system -- if anybody ever worked on the old IBM mainframe systems they had an excellent automatic "Generation data group" system where you specified how many generations you wished to keep -- say 3 -- then your next backup (vo) would cause the previous backup to become (v-1), and the old (v-1) become v(-2) and so on.

Often managing the files etc is more pain than the mechanics of doing backups in the first place - particularly with loads of music / other multi-media files.

Cheers
jimbo