Thx for the valuable info. Then v9 is on average 1.5 years away from release. OK, I will stick with v8 free for the time being and meantime will look for other options. Hasleo looks promising, I think.
So what did they do? Release a bad update as they announce EOL on the free version? I hope that is not a deliberate attempt to kill off the free copies. I am running the paid version but I think I'll skip this update.
They issued a fix straight away: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/macrium-reflect.356309/page-405#post-3118211 I have had no issues with build 7175.
I am wondering what the red bar refers to in the attached. I do not recall seeing it before and am a bit concerned about it.
The red bar itself isn’t a cause for concern, but…. 1. Why is a 200 MB EFI partition almost full? An EFI partition with a Windows Boot Manager instance occupies about 25 MB. 2. Why is there an EFI partition, which is meant to facilitate booting an OS, sitting on a data disk in the first place? Maybe LaCie has a bootable data recovery/diagnostics environment there? I’ve never worked with their products. You could temporarily assign that partition a drive letter and browse around to see what you find if you’re curious.
According to this: LaCie Mirror Portable Hard Drive review: Yes, storage drives can be beautiful - CNET
Nice find! Makes sense. In that case it seems LaCie didn’t want to allocate any more capacity for this purpose than was necessary, in which case the partition being nearly full would be expected and no cause for concern.
First thing I do when I get a drive is format it and ignore any compulsion to install any manufacturer's software. Never had a use for it and I don't like stuff on a drive I don't need. If you don't need it you can delete the partition it's on and reclaim the space for Music & Backup. However if you do need it, it's only taking up 197MB.
I make a copy of the manufacturer's software, "just in case", and then reformat everything. Usually because it is formatted exFAT and I switch it to NTFS.
You can get 2TB of WesternDigital external backup space (easily removable WD program/driver) for far less than the eye candy LaCie Mirror Portable 1 TB. Most user's want & expect reliability and dependability over fancy pants looks anyway.
Maybe. The last WD external I bought died after 2 years. There is no guarantee that anything is reliable long term anymore.
I won't and am not naive regarding WD's shortcomings in some of their products, which by now many have long since sworn off and with valid reasons. It's true that at best they can be a crapshoot, we take a chance every new drive or other internal PC electronic part that some issue can arise unexpected and quite possibly be enough to change our minds which brand that we find best results with. Fresh out of the box to years down the line. So that "maybe" applies to every company's product but more so some than others. What i point out for sake of this thread and replies is that even with WD notwithstanding, that ample external storage drive brands can and do offer more competitive pricing per TB quantity than that particular LaCie.
Thanks all for your comments, much appreciated. I feel better now. As to why I have the LaCie drive,,,,,,,one of my usb ports is a "Thunderbolt" and the LaCie drive was the only one I could find that specified as such. Not sure if its faster or not than USB 3 but I had bought a new PC that had the capacity so thought I would get an external drive that would work that port. Thanks to xxJackxx for the link to the LaCie site. A good find indeed.
If you have an HDD in there, then even USB 3.x Gen 1 would be more than you need. With a SATA SSD, USB 3.x Gen 2 would be more than you need. If you have an NVMe SSD in there, then Thunderbolt can make a difference — though now we also have USB4 that offers the same bandwidth.
I'm using Macrium Reflect 8 Home with the Incremental Forever plan. How do I set it to automatically delete the backup set on completion of 20 incremental backups and start a new backup set?
You can’t set Reflect to make a certain type of new backup based on accumulating a certain quantity of existing backups, at least not without some scripting. You can approximate that goal by adding a Full schedule that will run however often it would take to get 20 Incrementals though, and then set your Full retention to 1 backup. If you do this though, I’d suggest disabling “Run purge before backup”, otherwise Reflect would delete all of your existing backups at the beginning of a Full job, leaving you with a risk period of having no backups at all until (and unless) that backup completes successfully. What if your source disk fails after that initial purge but before you get a new backup? This is also not Incrementals Forever. If you want to make a new Full on a fairly frequent basis, I would suggest disabling Synthetic Fulls if you currently have that enabled.
Applies to Pro version. In macrium default settings: Retention Rules: Set it to the number of full backup sets you wish to keep. In my case, two. Yours One. I do not use differentials. set the number of incrementals you want to keep. I keep 3, you want 20. Set purge before... and Purge oldest to your personal choice. Incrementals are always based on a full set, so you must have at least one, or macrium will create one. If you delete a full it deletes the associated incrementals too. In my case, every friday i run a full backup. it deletes the oldest full AND its incrementals, then creates a new full. Every other day i run an incremental, it keeps three. on the 4th - sixth days it runs a new incremental and consolidates the oldest incremental back nto the full. If you set yours to 1 full, it will keep that for 20 incrementals. you can edit your full schedule start to run however often you want, ie. once a year in your case would give you one everlasting full, updated every incremental after 20 incs, and starting over every year or so - you can have it only run the next full in, say 2050, if that suits you. You can edit the schedule for the full backup to run however often you want to create new fulls, Ie every 20 days or so for you, thus not consolidating older incs into the full. Incrementals only take a few minutes. My fulls take a lot longer, so I start them a bit earlier in the evening.
@kronckew If you’re making a Full every week, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to use Synthetic Fulls rather than Incremental Merge, which is what you get if you disable Synthetic Fulls. If you’re also not KEEPING Fulls for very long, it might not make much of a practical difference in your case, but the reasons I recommended disabling it above are that: If you ever decide to use replication, Synthetic Fulls become a pain because you have to replicate an updated Full all the time rather than just an updated Incremental. If you keep Fulls for a while, repeated consolidation operations will cause in-file fragmentation (not disk-level fragmentation) to accumulate and reduce future consolidation performance. I’ve had Synthetic Fulls that could initially consolidate a 150 GB Incremental in an hour but after several dozen such consolidations took about 8 hours to do that. I would also suggest that you disable “Run purge before backup”, since it’s all risk and almost certainly no benefit in your case. Your current setup will mean that there are times where you’ll only have a single set on disk, which could be an issue if there turns out to be a problem in that set. And it’s not really achieving anything for you. Your Fulls can be purged mid-backup if needed to free up space, so you don’t have to purge them upfront. That only leaves the Incrementals, but you’re only retaining 3 of those. I’m going to guess that you aren’t running so low on destination disk capacity that you absolutely must perform the consolidation operation upfront to free up some space before writing the new Incremental. If I’m correct, then once again, “Run purge before backup” is all-risk and no reward for you.
i have a 256GB SSD usb3.2 external drive at the moment for backups, if I do 6 incrementals a week, and keep 2 fulls, it is pretty well filled as I keep other stuff on it too. Purge before lets me get away with it. My main internal drive is an SSD. So far, touch wood, if I've needed to do a restore, going back an incremental or two has been enough. I may break down in the near future and buy a bigger external drive, in which case I'll keep more fulls and a full weeks worth of incrementals. In my case i do not get automatic synthetic fulls, so I could turn that off without effect. I have on occasion, needed to make an incremental shortly after the scheduled one & manually consolidate it down into the earlier one. The box is ticked just because I was farting around with the settings. for the questioner with only 1 full and twenty incrementals, he might. Works for me, your case obviously works for you. To each his own.
Hello. New here ! I got Macrium v8 and it always says : Failed, could not do a Volume Snapshot. This on the four machines that I run here, all on W-10. It seems to me that I follow the easy steps to do this Clone job but it is forever refused. Where is the bone ?
