Macrium Reflect

For those still running v5, new version was released:

 

I use Zentimo xStorage Manager and it enables you to, among other things, lock a drive letter to a particular drive. That is, the drive letter cannot be changed without your direct involvement. I think this may/would have prevented your problem from occurring.

 

Cheers, Peter...much appreciated.

 

Hi Froggie, yest that does sound like a long span but you are quite correct that both versions of AXTM consolidate incrementals; v2 being more agressive than v1 in that it consolidates anything hourly for a day into a final overall incremental for that day, so at the end of the week I have 1 base image, 5 incrementals, 1 per day, and the final day I have hourly snaps...so in the end it does not end up being too looooooooooooooong, and gives me a certain degree of granularity which I like/am looking for.

Personally, going forward I would like to continue with that if I could, i.e., a base line image (of course) then hourly for the current day, which are consolidated into a a single incremental for the day every day of the week, and then if these are then consolidated in a differential for the whole week, I would then be happy to roll the whole set up for a month so ending up with, at the end of the month:

Week 1 Baseline + Differential x 1
Week 2 Differential x 1
Week 3 Differential x 1
Week 4 Incrementals x 5 + hourly x hours online for the last day (which would mean hourly daily for the current day which are then consolidated into a daily Incremental)

And then I would start again with a new baseline image, etc.

Is that feasible or am I mixing AXTm & Reflect v6 'metaphors'...if you get my drift?

Alternatively can you suggest something that approximates to the above in terms of what Reflect v6 can do?

Am open to suggestions.

Regards, Baldrick

 

Nice piece of detective work, if I may say so, and something that happens all the time when connecting up little used devices, as I have found to my cost in the past.

Balders

 

Hi BG

I use USB Safely Remove (Zentimo's precedecessor) and would concur that it should do as you say...but one must take care when locking drives with it as it can be unforgiving when unlocking them and on a couple of occassions I have had to roll back to undo changes it has made...may be just me but I would use with caution/clarity of thought and purpose present.

Balders

 

You can only do that by having two baselines - Macrium doesn't allow enough control over merging to do it with a single baseline, nor does it allow for Grandfather, Father, Son, Son's Baby(!). You might be able to fool it by using hardlinks - I think I made a post earlier in this thread that explains how - but I would instead suggest using 2x GFS backups, which is what I do.

 

This is probably more of a question about Windows then Macrium, but anyway: why is an image fragmented upon writing, even though there is more than enough contiguous free space to accommodate it in one piece?

My example: a freshly defragged 500gb disk, with about 250gb free. Macrium writes a 50mb image, and it's scattered all over the disk in 6 fragments (see pic in link - why won't images embed in posts for me?).

http://i.pictr.com/r1npvru9ah.jpg

 

Hi toatoo

Thanks for your input...so from what you are saying the best I can hope for in terms of what I am looking for is the Grandfather, Father, Son scheme...or is the Synthetic Full as a compromise?

Basically, at a pinch I think that I will have to make do with the ability to go back a any day in the current week, i.e., say 9am Sunday - Friday, and then to a specific day in the week, i.e., Saturday, for the prior weeks in the month assuming that I have baselined my backup on a Saturday to start with. The granularity within the current day (generally required for testing software) I will have to try to resolve by other means such as a VM or something like Returnil's QuietZone, etc.

If that is possible under Reflect v6 then which scheme set-up does it most closely 'reflect' (no pun intended)?

Many thanks for your assistance...it is greatly appreciated.

Regards, Baldrick

 

I think whatever you do it will be a compromise. You can certainly achieve what you mentioned in your previous post using either 2x GFS, or perhaps 1x GFS and one Forever Incrementals. There might be other ways of doing it too.

I've just read your initial post where you say you're currently having AX64 create a baseline once per week, and then hourly incrementals thereafter. I presume you either delete or archive your baseline each week.

That's easy to approximate with Macrium - you could have something like a GFS with a weekly full (keep 1), daily diff (keep 7), hourly incremental (keep 12 or so).

You should be able to do that in a similar way to my first example, something like a GFS with a monthly full (keep 1), weekly diff (keep 4), daily incremental (keep 7).

Alternatively you could perhaps do something like a GFS with a monthly full (keep 1), weekly diff (keep 4), four-hourly incremental (keep, say, 12). That might allow you to have a greater selection of backups within the last couple of days, at the expense of fewer within the last week.

Personally I do something like a weekly full (keep 1), daily diff (keep 7), hourly incremental (keep 6). Additionally I have a separate Forever Incremental with a synthetic full, that takes a incremental once a week, and retains 12 of them - so it goes back about 3 months. You could equally do that second backup with another GFS.

If you're brave, I did some experimentation with having multiple backup jobs share a single baseline (in order to make it work more like AX64). It probably has more downsides than upsides, but if interested here's a description:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/macrium-reflect.356309/page-61#post-2463040
..and some of the downsides are pointed out here:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/macrium-reflect.356309/page-62#post-2463397

I would watch the videos that were linked to earlier in the thread, and think about what backup(s) you might be able to set up that would be a good compromise for your needs.

 

Hi taotoo (spelled it right this time...)

Many thanks for all of that. I do like your idea of running two chains but as I am new to Reflect v6 I think that I will try to start simply and then complicate further once I have the basics under my belt. I will check out the vids that you have suggested (have just found them embebbed in the Help online) but at first glance, and subject to seeing the vids, the

"weekly full (keep 1), daily diff (keep 7), hourly incremental (keep 6)" schema

that you mention seems to be closest to what I am looking for without complicating things...but one question. That will cover me for ONE week so if I change the weekly full to (keep 4) will that mean that the 'daily diff (keep 7), hourly incremental (keep 6)' that is the Father and Son to the Grandfather (if I have gotten my terms correct) will also be repeated 4 times too or will I be forced to manually start a new weekly schema each week?

Apologies for all the questions...I should knuckle down and watch the vids/read the help text, shouldn't I?

Cheers, Baldrick

 

I have found that if I use Disk Management to set the drive letter at the end of the alphabet, or towards the end, then it will stick through reboots on drives that are not always on. You do have to make sure there is enough space in the alphabet so that it will not be overwritten by other occasional drives.

 

I have not had any issues changing drive letters when needed. When I upgraded my USB2 drives for USB3 I changed all of the old drives letters so I could have the new ones with the letter appropriate to the function (M: for the music drive, B: for the backup drive, etc) without issue. Perhaps its because I am using the current version of the app.

 

Yes you got your terms right If you change the weekly full to keep 4, after 4 weeks you will have 4 full images. The diffs and incrementals won't be kept for each week - it will literally just keep the 7 most recent diffs, and 6 most recent incrementals. So you would have something like FFFF DDDDDDD IIIIII, or at times I believe you would have something like FFF DDD F DDDD IIIIIII etc.

 

Because I have too many drives and externals that I do not keep powered up continually I need to keep certain external sacrosanct so that Macrium can find the correct drive when needed. Might be better to name them A or B since those are the last to be nominated and floppies aren't used anymore.

I have been wondering mapping an external would help. Although a drive letter is nominated, would the mapping take preference over the drive letter?

 

Hi taotoo

That sound like what I need as I tend to keep currently & manually, with AXTM, four sets each of which includes a full (at the start of the week) plus consolidated increments one per day of that week, and hourlies in the last day of the week (this is AXTM inbuilt snapshot consolidation mechanism at work), and to be honest I rarely need to go back further than a month back at worst and at best a couple of days. I mainly need the hourlys for the current day and then the dailys for the last 2 or 3 days (plus I will have a single full image as a periodic baseline...just in case)

So, if I did go for a "weekly full (keep 4), daily diff (keep 7), hourly incremental (keep " schema


would I be able to periodically 'detach' or copy one of the weekly full images, possibly the oldest one, without messing up the schema, or would Macrium complain that what it was expecting to be there and delete itself has disappeared? In other words, despite being part of a schema are the weekly Full images standalone?

If I could not do that then I would have to set up another schema to periodically, perhaps monthly, just to take a full image?

Again, thanks for your help & patience...it is much appreciated.

Regards, Baldrick

 

I have a 1TB drive with 3 partitions X, Y & Z and my weekly scheduled Reflect FULL backup image is written to X. These letters are at the high end and don't change regardless of any other drives that are temporarily active in my system. Occasionally I do a manual FULL backup to one of those 'normally off-line' disks and simply set that drive letter when setting the parameters for the backup, e.g. E:

 

I'm really liking MR6 so far, a 3GB incremental took 1min 13 second to create WITH verification. That's pretty much the time it took for AX64 v2 to create an incremental after a while (Speed in v2 got worse much quicker than in v1 for me) and that's without verification to the best of my knowledge.

The latest restore I did either took 3 minutes or 6 minutes... I can't remember, but the majority of that time was checking the verification, especially of the baseline, so without verification it would be MUCH quicker, probably around the 1min mark.

(I do one baseline and then only incrementals after that)

 

A weekly full image is standalone (and can be deleted without affecting any other backup) as long as it doesn't have any child diffs or incrementals. For example:

Wk 1. F
Wk 2. F
Wk 3. F DDDDDD IIII
Wk 4. F D II

You can delete the full from week 1, as it has no dependents. The same with week 2.

You can delete the full from week 3, however you will lose both the remaining differentials and incrementals from that week. Deleting this full won't affect the differentials or incrementals from week 4.

You can't delete the full from week 4 without also losing the differential and incrementals from the same week.

If you go to delete a full/diff/incremental from within Macrium's UI, it will show you which other backups will be deleted at the same time.

 

Hi again

I have now been running AX64 for over 24 hours and done a lot more than 5 restores with their WinPE environment installed without any problems so i beleive even stronger now that it is a Macrium problem i had and probably in conjunction with my pc model and or the software setup . Hardware issue still comes in 2 place in my mind as possible cause .

I now put the lid on this matter at least on this forum and thank thoose who communicated with me about it .

 

Hello Pb1,

If you are feeling upto it, use this tutorial I wrote a few years ago to boot into Macrium Recovery Media using EasyBCD from your local HDD. This way you will not face any problems and the boot process is in your control. I have been using this process for the last 4-5 years without any problems with all my bootable media.

Tutorial - Booting into a WinPE recovery environment without using a bootable media

 

Thanks,

I just assumed that since RDR is restoring just the changed sectors, so depending on the available free space on HDD the files would be all over the place and the next increment after a couple of restores would be a lot larger than the normal size.

 

This is exactly the reason I am using the Zentimo app, I have multiple drives that are only plugged in when I need them and the drive letters changing became a problem. Now that each drive has a fixed letter the problem has been eliminated. I don't have any idea if mapping the drives would help or no so you are on your own there.

 

Hi taotoo

I really appreciate your time to enlighten me re. this.

So if I where, using our example, to move the oldest weekly full image, i.e., Wk 1. F to a new drive or folder, say when actually in Wk 4., Macrium should not object, based on what you have suggested, and so I should be able to keep it as a long term backup if I so wished?

If that is the case then I think that a

"weekly full (keep 4), daily diff (keep 7), hourly incremental (keep 8 or keep 10) schema

should be roughly what I am looking for and what I will try initially to see how I get on with that.

Cheers, Baldrick