Macrium Reflect

Great! This is it. Just wonder why they made it in so unintuitive way. They should have rather made it with right-clicking on the .XML file itself. This file should contain all relevant data for the particular backup so that it could be easily transferable to a new system.

Thanks!!

 

There is also a menu item for importing/exporting all settings.


You can also use the 'Defaults' to set Macrium to use the windows task manager for scheduling, which will get your schedules backed up/restored as part of a Macrium system backup.

There are more ways than one to skin a catfish.

 

...didn't even think about a right click on that.

 

You’re sure that backing up settings with that menu option will include schedules if you’re using Macrium Task Scheduler? I haven’t verified that, but I’d be surprised.

 

It's nothing to get too excited about, but it may sway some.

 

How can I find out what is in my most recent incremental weekly backup (only) of my data drive?

It’s over 15 GB and took almost 3 hours, while most of these incremental backups are a few hundreds of MB and finish within minutes.

(The log gives no useful info to research this)

 

If it’s an image backup, mount that backup and the preceding Incremental at the same time, then use an application that will show differences between their contents. I use a free application called WinMerge for this purpose. A Size/Date compare should be sufficient for this purpose, and make sure to enable Tree Mode under the View menu.

 

restore menu item, 'explore image' will mount the backup as a drive. pick the latest backup from the resulting list, tick the box for tha partition of your 'C:' drive:

Note: I only had 2 'fulls' I consolidated my previous Friday & its incrementals and ran a 'full' last night after a windows 'insider' update. Macrium amounted it as drive E:, which I will now unmount via the 'restore' - Detach image' menu item

 

I have tried this in the past, but would see all content (full plus all incremental backups) at once.

It’s an image indeed, so this might work! Will try this later today.

Thank you both for helping me out.

 

WinMerge failed to show a difference (too many files on this 2 TB drive?).

As an alternative I tried Everything instead. I sorted the files on date for both the last and penultimate image. Between 16 and 23 November about 40 files were created and those were less than 100 MB.

Knowing this I (still) totally don't understand why this incremental image is 15+ GB...

 

Was the volume defragmented?

 

Not by me.

Does Windows (11) do that automatically?

 

it will if it's a HDD.

 

Yes. Even if it is a SSD. It happens monthly. About. If you check your drive daily with a defag program you can see when it happens. And the image after a defrag will be larger.

 

"C:\WINDOWS\system32\dfrgui.exe" is a system utility. It can be run manually. SSD are NOT defragged (they don't need to be, and it's bad for them if you use a defrag that will rearrange the memory cells, which wears them out faster. It does NOT improve read/write speed at all. It trims by zeroing the used but erased cells for more efficient re-use. Actual 'hard disks' with spinning platters DO benefit from defragging as it moves the chunks of data into order on the platter, so the read head doesn't need to move around as much, which slows down the reading of large files. SSDs have no 'heads' that move around. The windows utility will not let you 'defrag' a drive recognised as an SSD.

My system has a NVME SSD as the main C: drive, and an external USB 3.1 SSD as my Backup Drive. The Util's windows type checker thinks it's a HDD, but the rest o the program thinks - hey wait, it's an SSD, so it only trims it, but it tells the type checker there is 0% fragmentation.

 

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-real-and-complete-story-does-windows-defragment-your-ssd

 

Starting with Windows 7, the automatic routine for SSDs is “optimization”, which as I understand it involves having the SSD perform a TRIM operation. The application was renamed Optimize Drives or something to account for the fact that SSDs do not get defragmented.

 

If a Defrag was run, it will leave a log entry. Go to "Computer Management -> Event Viewer -> Windows Logs -> Application" and then sort the data by the "Source" column. It will be alphabetically sorted by application type. Scroll to the "Ds" and find "Defrag". Compare the dates when the Defrag was run and your next incremental size. Typically Windows will only run a TRIM operation on an SSD, but it is Windows so a bug could have developed.

I usually keep the automatic defrag and optimization off and manually run the utility once a month.

 

The backup image taken the next day was three times larger than expected.

Tests I've done in the past...
Checked fragmentation daily in Defraggler64 with Analyze. Taken occasional screenshots. When the Fragmentation is greater than 10% you need to watch it daily. "The next day" the Fragmentation could be 2%, the screenshot is quite different and the backup image is larger.

 

Brian, is your Win11 installed on a HDD? Because for a SSD it should show something like this:

 

Raza,

It's on a NVMe SSD.
The very next entry in the log is a retrim for the C: drive. So defrag and retrim.
I see similar results in my other computer with a NVMe SSD.

 

Brian, I have two NVMe SSDs and a HDD in my laptop. I just double checked the logs, Defrag utility only runs a retrim operation on both NVMe SSDs and runs a regular defrag operation only on the data HDD, if it is fragmented above 10% that is. I can also confirm this from my Macrium incremental images, as the next image after a retrim of my C drive is the usual size.

Windows 11 should not be running a defrag on a SSD!

 

Raza, my wife's computer is a MBR system with the Win 11 OS and data partition on a standard SSD. Apart from the retrims, both partitions are defragged every month or so.

It must be a Southern hemisphere thing. Weird.

 

taotoo posted a link indicating SSDs are being defragged.

 

I read that linked article. It is dated. I guess it is possible that on Windows 7 and older OS's that were not designed from ground up to run on SSDs, a defrag of a SSD was required for Windows with Volsnap turned on to function correctly. But Windows 10 and now Windows 11 were developed when SSD's were widespread. I do not believe they suffer from the same issues. In any case I have not heard anyone else repeating the info presented in that article.