Raza, it is indeed a bit confusing so please correct me if I am wrong. At the point after having reverted back to incremental 5, my system still has incremental 8 stored and I could move back to that if I wanted. So in a way the presence is the past as the future Now, assuming the reason I wanted to move back to No 5 in the first place is some type of malware, does that mean that this is still lurking in there and if so, what possible consequence might that have?
If you have a malware then the best course of action would be to delete increments 6, 7 and 8 after reverting back to increment 5. This way, your next increment will just be the changed data from increment 5 and you will no longer need or be dependent on the old increments 6, 7 and 8. You new chain will be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and the new 6.
I just love Macrium and it's RDR.. I have only done one FULL backup, which is stored on several different hd's, and then just incrementals all the way. Macrium is my "time machine".
yup. what they said...except for stode, works for him maybe, but i'm a bit leery of that one full, even if it has a lot of incrementals. as noted earlier, space management doesn't work when you split files.
I just had another long incremental backup. It's on a schedule and did one yesterday afternoon (missed backup) with a normal time of about 2.5 minutes. This morning it's about 40 minutes and nothing has changed with the system and it wasn't even a full 24 hrs since the last one. Previous backup was about 1.1 GB (why that big I"m not sure as not much changed that I know of), the one this morning was 2.8 GB. I guess MS updates my the be cause of the size, other than that nothing has changed. I also noticed that mid way through the transfer rate dropped to about 170 MBPS then eventually back to about 800. My backup drive for this plan is the second HD in the laptop. I'm unsure why the drop in speed when everything else seems to be running perfectly. Anyone understand why there would be occasionally long incrementals? Thanks for helping me get a grasp on this new to me program.
Dagrev, without doing much of anything, daily, on one of my systems... daily INCs still generate about 750mb-1gb of "miscellaneous" changes, all due to Windows activity. To date since January 2015) I've seen nothing out of the ordinary that I couldn't attribute to Windows or something else I may have had going on. That other 1.7-gB of yours sounds like some updates. Is that "second HD" you mention above a real separate HD or a 2nd partition on the same HD?
Thanks Froggie. It is indeed a second HD in the laptop. Even with many changes, they were handled well when an occasional longer snap by AX64 was run. Much shorter than the couple 40 min ones I've had with Reflect. Just wondering what might be going on. Thanks again.
The only reason for a sector based imaging utility like Macrium to produce an abnormally large incremental backup image is if the actual sectors on the disk have changed. The usual culprit in such cases is a disk defrag utility, an installed software that is using your HDD as a temporary storage space, download manager that downloads and saves the partially downloaded file segments on your HDD before reconstitution, temporary files from internet browsers, and a POP (or to a lesser extent even an IMAP) based email client that downloads its emails on your HDD. Temporary files generated by Windows and other software including those left behind after a software install are additional culprits. Do you have any of these on your HDD? I am not sure why your increment of 2.8 GB took 40 minutes to complete! I do one increment per day and usually my increments are between 600 MB and 700 MB in size, and take between 2-3 minutes to complete, but on Thursdays my increments are usually over 4 GB in size, because my scheduled disk defragmentation runs on Thursdays. But even then the time Macrium takes to complete a 4 GB+ increment is usually between 5-6 minutes. There might be a conflict between Macrium and some other software on your PC that is preventing Macrium from completing its backup in time.
Thank you Raza for the detailed possibilities regarding the long snapshots. I use MS Outlook to access gmail and outlook.com email (IMAP). There is no defrag going on because it adds to the size of snapshots. Nor is there any cleaning of temp (via CC Cleaner or the like) that would change the data, nor were there any downloads between snapshots that I recall. Prior to Macrium I updated this laptop to Win 10 a week ago and possibly there are downloads that are getting the system caught up. I'll look into that. Last night I did an incremental test. It took <3 min. This morning while typing this, a scheduled snapshot began and it's telling me it will take an hour to complete. I'm seriously confused, as AX64 never did this unless there were noticeable changes.
Don't look at the time to completion during the backup process, it always starts out with a large time to completion but this drops rapidly as the process works to the end. I bet if you look at the logs you will find that this mornings snap took way less than an hour to complete (unless of course this was a full or weekly snap rather than a daily).
Dagrev, both last night's incremental and this morning's scheduled INC will both have LOG entries. In those LOG entries will you post 2-pieces of info for both... under "Saving Partition" post the "New File Size," and under the last entry (Image Completed Successfully) post the "I/O Performance."
I noticed the time drop off but it doesn't drop off to anything close to what and incremental would require I wold think. Still in the 40 Min+ area.
Thanks. During the last one the power went out. (And I don't leave the battery in for fear it might burn the house down when away or sleeping. Possibly those fears are no longer real.) Below is what I think you requested. Saving Partition- New File Size 260 GB (First log, full backup) I/O Performance Read: 520 Mb/s - Write 287 Mb/s (last incremental which took 3 min. and was 800 Mb) The last incremental that was slow was 1 Gb and about the same read/write speed. Thanks to all for your time and insight. Update: Last Incr. this morning: 5 Gb in size, Read 1Gb/ Write 320 Mb/s. It took 46 minutes and I could find no updates that would cause big changes. (I am using Froggie's backup plan if that helps--one full and all incrementals thereafter.)
Well, they were almost the same in size so Reflect should have done almost the same in speed/time. it sounds like something else is going on during Reflect's I/O period that's causing that delay... something else running on either the SOURCE or TARGET disk. I can't really guess any more than that...
I completely understand and appreciate your time. Everything seems fine to me (with my limited knowledge and disks seem to be in perfect health). The target disk is simply a clone with extra space from the main HD--though it's not a SS hybrid like the first. I do this in case I'm away from home I can restore and not carry an additional HD. I can live with the longer backups (than AX64) as long a the restores stay fast and reliable. Possibly things will settle down or I'll notice what else might be running.
Dagrev, another Reflect user, BG (BGoodman4) had a similar problem a while back associated with imaging to an external device... big differences with image timings. I don't know what his resolution was (or maybe still is) but maybe he'll chime in with a suggestion as to your timing issue.
Oh, I had a similar issue when incremental backups would take much more time : it was solved after stopping a maximum of active tasks but I don't really know which one could be reponsible for the delay increase (size was unchanged).
Basically I set my schedule to run at 5:30 am so the time to complete the snap is not an issue as I am sleeping when it happens. BTW when I run a manual snap they never take longer than a minute or two but as noted above they start out showing an hour plus but then quickly drop to much less time.
When you upgraded to Windows 10, was Macrium already installed on your PC? i.e. Did you upgrade with Macrium? If so, I recommend you completely uninstall Macrium and Reinstall a fresh copy on Windows 10. This may solve your long time to take an increment problem. I am not a big fan of OS upgrades. How do you account for the 5 GB worth of changed sectors in less than a day? There has to be something changing data on your HDD. You actually have two separate issues going on with your system. 1) Some software is making changes to your HDD, so your daily increments are huge 5 GB+ in size. 2) It is taking 46 minutes for Macrium to create a 5 GB image, when it should just take it 5-6 minutes. Reinstalling Macrium may solve the second problem. I did not know such fears were ever real !!!
Thank you all for your responses. I think I found the problem. When I upgraded to Win 10 it reset the system defrag back to the default on. I have turned it off so that might give me some smaller snaps. I'm sorry for wasting your time but I never thought defrag would be turned back on, but in hindsight it sounds like something MS would do. I'll confirm after a few more snaps if this was indeed the case. FYI: I installed Macrium after upgrading to Win 10. I was running Acronis and AX64, and getting rid of Acronis has been a pain. Using the TI cleaner affects Macrium so I've had to leave a few things for now, but that's another story.
I suspected that some defrag software was active on your system. Now you just need to figure our why it takes so long for an increment to complete.
I had no idea the crazy thing got turn on (I leave it off). Since not all snapshots are long I hope it was due to the defraging going on. A couple of days and I should know.
