Whats up here?

glasskuter · Mar 13, 2022

Is it just me, or do you folks agree that differential and incremental backups are not worth the effort since a system can do a full backup in less then 15 minutes? I tried differential backups at first and restore became a nightmare for me. Maybe I was doing it wrong.

Bastet · Mar 13, 2022

My full backup of all partitions takes 4 + hours including verifying - that’s from a 2TB SSD to a 5TB external HDD whereas an incremental takes a few minutes so in my case it’s not viable to run a full backup every day or week.

glasskuter · Mar 13, 2022

Bastet said:
4 + hours including verifying

Wow! It's understandable as your partition scheme is much larger and more complicated than mine. Mine is fairly vanilla in both my systems and nothing I do is 100% sensitive so the world wouldn't come to an end if I lost a few days data. I'm sure I did something wrong when I was experimenting with differentials. I had no problem with the backups, only the restores.

Bastet · Mar 13, 2022

I’ve never had problems restoring thankfully.

CornishRattler · Mar 13, 2022

glasskuter said:
Is it just me, or do you folks agree that differential and incremental backups are not worth the effort since a system can do a full backup in less then 15 minutes? I tried differential backups at first and restore became a nightmare for me. Maybe I was doing it wrong.

I do a full system back up once a week and that’s it. All my individual files and folders are synced online as I go so that more than enough

Bree · Mar 13, 2022

glasskuter said:
Is it just me, or do you folks agree that differential and incremental backups are not worth the effort since a system can do a full backup in less then 15 minutes? I tried differential backups at first and restore became a nightmare for me. Maybe I was doing it wrong.

At least three times as long as that on my System One....

Macrium Reflect Log

	Total Selected:	83.23 GB
	Image and Verification Completed Successfully in 00:45:57

glasskuter said:
I'm sure I did something wrong when I was experimenting with differentials. I had no problem with the backups, only the restores.

When you have a Full plus one or more Differentials and/or Incrementals, then to do a restore you just restore the Differential or Incremental for the date you want to go back to. The restore then proceeds just as it would when restoring a Full image. It automatically restores the required full image and applies the subsequent changes.

With a Differential you need just that one Differential and its Full image, to restore an Incremental you need the Full image and all Incrementals up to and including the one you chose to restore.

dlross · Mar 13, 2022

Bastet said:
My full backup of all partitions takes 4 + hours including verifying - that’s from a 2TB SSD to a 5TB external HDD whereas an incremental takes a few minutes so in my case it’s not viable to run a full backup every day or week.

There are reasons for incrementals beyond speed of backup however. For example we run monthly fulls with daily incrementals and save two sets of fulls/incrs. As someone stated above you can do a full image restore to any given date, but more importantly with Reflect you can mount any given incremental and copy back any given file from that date. This is particularly useful when something may have corrupted a file several days ago but only now has been discovered. We adopted this schema in the days when my wife was doing a lot of graphics work and publishing layouts. There were instances when some change had been made previously that just didn't pan out and it was easiest to go back to a given point than to try to correct the error. We don't have as much need for this type of restoration any more but I keep the system running this way for those instances where some program install or settings change clobbers the system and I can just go back to yesterdays incremental and restore the system to that point.

Ghot · Mar 13, 2022

Bikeit said:
Ok guys thanks a lot for all your help to date, I have followed your suggestions. Hopefully this is correct?

Looks good. Your backup is down to 143Gb which will allow you 6 backups on that 1TB drive.
So you'll want to set the "Retention Rule" at "6", instead of 12.

Bikeit · Mar 13, 2022

Ghot said:
Looks good. Your backup is down to 143Gb which will allow you 6 backups on that 1TB drive.
So you'll want to set the "Retention Rule" at "6", instead of 12.

Thank a lot Ghot for all you help and patience, am I just as well to do backups as differentials?

Ghot · Mar 13, 2022

Bikeit said:
Thank a lot Ghot for all you help and patience, am I just as well to do backups as differentials?

I would just do full backups. If you do incremental or differentials... you're gonna fill up that 1TB fast.
If you know you're gonna make some changes, and you're not sure about them... just make a backup.

Also, most of us make a backup right before a Windows Update... 2nd Tuesday of the month.... just in case.

CornishRattler · Mar 13, 2022

Ghot said:
Also, most of us make a backup right before a Windows Update... 2nd Tuesday of the month.... just in case.

Weekly for me on the Dev channel and as you said above for the non funky channels

glasskuter · Mar 13, 2022

Ghot said:
you're gonna fill up that 1TB fast.

In this particular case, that was my reasoning as well. @Bastet situation above is not the norm.

BrianInEngland · Mar 13, 2022

glasskuter said:
Is it just me, or do you folks agree that differential and incremental backups are not worth the effort since a system can do a full backup in less then 15 minutes? I tried differential backups at first and restore became a nightmare for me. Maybe I was doing it wrong.

I do a full System drive backup every Sunday, with an Incremental every other day. I keep two Full images. If I'm doing something to Windows (new drivers, updates) then I run another Incremental backup first. Takes very little time with NVMe drives. My data files/personal stuff is on a separate physical drive and synced to OneDrive. I also make a local file and folder backup of this every other day.

cereberus · Mar 13, 2022

glasskuter said:
Is it just me, or do you folks agree that differential and incremental backups are not worth the effort since a system can do a full backup in less then 15 minutes? I tried differential backups at first and restore became a nightmare for me. Maybe I was doing it wrong.

It really depends what you are doing. Incrementals are great when you want to test something quckly e.g. some regedits but do one, test one say but you do not want to wait 15 mins between each change. With Macrium Reflect's paid feature, Rapid Delta Resyore, I can wind back and forth in a few minutes.

Also, suppose I want a backup every day for a week A full plis 6 incrementals takes a lot less space than 6 fulls.