How to copy backups to multiple drives? (the "3" in 3-2-1)

TraderGary · Jan 9, 2025

@hdmi, my world for the past 20 years has been trading the stock market. I need a fast and reliable backup strategy that works. My 3-2-1 strategy is outlined earlier in this thread. I can make a Macrium Reflect X image of my entire C drive, including all my data and photos, in just a little over 3 minutes. For the way I work, backup time is important. Macrium Reflect and Windows built-in OneDrive have never failed me.

My background: My first computer was the original IBM PC in 1981. I was unemployed at the time. I purchased MS BASIC, Pascal, C, and Assembler. I worked day and night studying and a year later was able to pass interviews to become a software engineer for a major corporation. Over the years with them, I wrote their internal telephone system, their customer support system, and I was webmaster for their first corporate website. I retired early as I was making more trading stocks than I was making from my job. My college degree is in music performance on piano and violin. I'm totally self trained in computers with no computer science degree.

hdmi · Jan 9, 2025

TraderGary said:
@hdmi, my world for the past 20 years has been trading the stock market. I need a fast and reliable backup strategy that works. My 3-2-1 strategy is outlined earlier in this thread. I can make a Macrium Reflect X image of my entire C drive, including all my data and photos, in just a little over 3 minutes.

I never need to make an image of my entire C drive, as all my important personal files like documents, photos and videos are separately backed up like I said, and unimportant files either are not backed up or are almost never backed up. Having more control over what gets included and what gets excluded in the image is high among primary reasons why my strategy is fast, and noticeably faster when compared to making an image of my entire C drive. Like I also said, (VSS) snapshot-based images of the C drive that are created while Windows is still actively running on the C drive aren't reliable enough due to adding several potential risks in exchange for nothing real. As a matter of fact, for how I use my 2 laptops, a snaphot-based strategy wouldn't even be able to work anyway in the first place.

TraderGary said:
For the way I work, backup time is important.

See above. Even if could find an easy way to make your strategy work for me, it would still not be any faster. There would be useless bloat, and reliability would suffer.

TraderGary said:
Macrium Reflect and Windows built-in OneDrive have never failed me.

My house never caught on fire. Ergo, getting a home fire insurance was a poor strategy, as I could have gotten more whisky instead. Getting more whisky would have never failed me. Enough said.

TraderGary said:
My background: My first computer was the original IBM PC in 1981. I was unemployed at the time. I purchased MS BASIC, Pascal, C, and Assembler. I worked day and night studying and a year later was able to pass interviews to become a software engineer for a major corporation. Over the years with them, I wrote their internal telephone system, their customer support system, and I was webmaster for their first corporate website. I retired early as I was making more trading stocks than I was making from my job. My college degree is in music performance on piano and violin. I'm totally self trained in computers with no computer science degree.

I didn't graduate until more than a few years after I dropped out of university TBH. I know as well as you do that diplomas and training certificates are not the be all end all, and the thing about whitepapers is that toilet paper are a kind of white paper too. However, when it comes to understanding what snapshots can and cannot be used for, I also know that there are places on the internet where I could try to explain (and re-re-re-explain) some fundamental concepts of why snaphots aren't backups until I weighed an ounce and still continue to fall on deaf ears, if you mean what I get........

misterpersister · Jan 9, 2025

hdmi said:
For reasons that are not wholly dissimilar to why I avoid whatever-copy like the plague, I avoid Macrium like the plague.

But you do use FastCopy, right?
If you mean that Macrium is bad software, can you please explain why (besides the VSS stuff)? I'm still evaluating it and I don't want to spend money on a bad solution.

hdmi said:
I also use FastCopy to, also manually, copy important personal files from the laptop's internal SSD to multiple external USB 3.0 HDDs

So you don't do the usual "versioned" backups like full, differential and/or incremental, but rather synchronize your primary directories with the backup duplicates on the external drives?
If yes, then why so?

I have several "entities" I need to backup. My system volume only contains Windows and apps. Was going to backup it using bootable media so the Windows is not running at all while being backed up (because I'm very conservative in this regard, was using Norton Ghost previously). But I also need to selectively backup some folders on other drives/partitions.
Is Macrium suitable for these tasks? If not, then what you'd suggest?

TraderGary · Jan 9, 2025

@hdmi, am I then understanding your saying that your backup solution is the only right way because all other backup solutions are slower and unreliable?

Bree · Jan 9, 2025

misterpersister said:
If you mean that Macrium is bad software, can you please explain why (besides the VSS stuff)? I'm still evaluating it and I don't want to spend money on a bad solution.

That is hdmi's personal opinion, particularly the VSS stuff. It is a minority view, but he's welcome to express it all the same.

I've been using Macrium Reflect since 2017 when v7 was first released. First as Reflect Free, then I purchased a 4-pack of v7 licences for Reflect Home a year later. I upgraded those to v8 when it was released, and I now have bought two additional licences, one v8 and one for Reflect X Home. I now have 6 licences, with several more PCs still on Reflect Free.

I have more PCs to back than just the five listed in 'My Computers' below. Over those 8 years I have literally made thousands of images, and many hundreds of restores. Never had any issues.

starchase · Jan 9, 2025

The bottom line is that each user has requirements for backups that require their own plan suitable for specific needs. And if those needs are met the mission is accomplished. Everyone must be satisfied with their own backup plan. And there are plans and tools for (all) requirements and needs. Just make sure you have a plan.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

TraderGary said:
@hdmi, am I then understanding your saying that your backup solution is the only right way because all other backup solutions are slower and unreliable?

Of course not. Why would you even think that anyway? For anything work related, I never use my 2 laptops that you see in my specs. These are just for my own personal hobby stuff. I am not allowed to publicly discuss specific details about what I use for work, but what I can tell you is that it isn't running on a Microsoft operating system, and, the backup mechanism that it uses doesn't even come close to anything that has ever been mentioned on Elevenforum or Tenforums.

Java Enterprise software development is just not a topic on here. In part, it's because Microsoft has pretty much always turned its back towards it, but all the largest corporations use it. Just to give only one example of how relevant Java technology is in the modern world, Google announced last year that they are switching from C++ to Java and Rust.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

Bree said:
That is hdmi's personal opinion, particularly the VSS stuff. It is a minority view, but he's welcome to express it all the same.

No, it isn't my personal opinion. Rather, it's what is written in the official documentation from Microsoft.

Bree said:
I've been using Macrium Reflect since 2017 when v7 was first released. First as Reflect Free, then I purchased a 4-pack of v7 licences for Reflect Home a year later. I upgraded those to v8 when it was released, and I now have bought two additional licences, one v8 and one for Reflect X Home. I now have 6 licences, with several more PCs still on Reflect Free.

I have more PCs to back than just the five listed in 'My Computers' below. Over those 8 years I have literally made thousands of images, and many hundreds of restores. Never had any issues.

That's just because you've been lucky.

misterpersister · Jan 10, 2025

hdmi said:
That's just because you've been lucky.

Can you please clarify if you mean usage of VSS or you're speaking about Macrium in general?
If I should consider better (more reliable) backup software, could you please share what you'd use?
I mean, besides copying directories to external drives, I thought that versioned images (full, diff., incr.) is the way to go. If this approach is not good for any reason, please share your knowledge or some keywords so I can google and study how to do that better. Of course, I'm interested in reliability primarily (for system drive as well as for other separate folders), the second priority is space requirements, and the least important is speed. But, of course, not something inconveniently slow. Unless it's the only option while all the fast(er) ones are just so unreliable that they sabotage the whole purpose of backups.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

misterpersister said:
But you do use FastCopy, right?

Yes, I use the free version of it. RealTimeSync, which is a feature of FreeFileSync, can also be set up such that it uses a separate copy tool within a batch file. Since FastCopy can be run from the command line or within a batch file, it can be used also for this purpose, but I don't use FreeFileSync personally.

misterpersister said:
If you mean that Macrium is bad software, can you please explain why (besides the VSS stuff)? I'm still evaluating it and I don't want to spend money on a bad solution.

It isn't bad software, but for reliability it just isn't that great. While it is true that it also has a bootable Rescue Media that lets you run the image creation process in an isolated environment (WinRE/WinPE-based), its bootable Rescue Media still lacks a few important features IMO, and, I am not convinced that the verification mechanism that its bootable Rescue Media uses is equally as robust as that of the bootable Rescue Media of Acronis True Image. AFAIK the former doesn't read the data twice from the source. Whereas the latter does have that option, and is designed such that it keeps the difference between the verification process and the restore operation very small. This engineering concept also helps data forensics experts to investigate whether the verification process is trustworthy. Thing is, you don't even have to pay extra for it. As a matter of fact, if you are the owner of an eligible storage device from Western Digital, Crucial, Sabrent, ADATA or Seagate, you get a free license.

The main difference [between the verification process that the bootable Rescue Media of Acronis True Image has and the restore operation that it also has] is that, unlike the restore operation, the verification process doesn't write the data from image to the source, but rather, it compares the data from image to the data already present on the source. It also means that, when verification is enabled, the data is read twice from the source (one time to create the image, one time to verify that image). Since no running processes can interfere with the data present on the source at any time during this whole job of creating the image and verifying the image immediately after it has successfully been created, it helps to ensure that the data captured from the source is valid and free of errors/inconsistencies. But if it doesn't read the data twice from the source, there's the potential risk that read errors are not detected. That plus the lack of important (to me, anyway) features is why I don't use the bootable Rescue Media of Macrium Reflect 8.1 Free. As for Macrium Reflect X, its bootable Rescue Media still lacks a few important features, and I am still not convinced that its bootable Rescue Media's verification mechanism can fully be trusted. It also costs more than Acronis True Image. So, why should I pay more for less?

Backups are a form of data protection. Protections that cannot be trusted due to too many unknown factors aren't the greatest IMO. That's just my own personal opinion. However, facts about the VSS that are documented by Microsoft are not part of that opinion. Those are just facts.

misterpersister said:
So you don't do the usual "versioned" backups like full, differential and/or incremental, but rather synchronize your primary directories with the backup duplicates on the external drives?
If yes, then why so?

The bootable Rescue Media of Acronis True Image lets me create full/incremental images as needed. It also lets me specify file/folder exclusions, conveniently in its GUI, also as needed. FastCopy runs in Diff mode by default. FastCopy may be fast especially in Diff mode, but I also use it for its stability and reliability with optional verification, optional on-the-fly file hash codes calculation+logging, and Unicode-supporting per-file error logging. I also use WinRAR on large numbers of small files mostly, as creating+copying+extracting a .zip file usually will be faster than directly copying many small files.

Besides the external drives, I also use a private cloud on my RT-AX92U 2-Pack mesh system from Asus. Each node also has a USB 3.0 port that performs well enough for it to be used as a cheap NAS replacement.

misterpersister said:
I have several "entities" I need to backup. My system volume only contains Windows and apps. Was going to backup it using bootable media so the Windows is not running at all while being backed up (because I'm very conservative in this regard, was using Norton Ghost previously). But I also need to selectively backup some folders on other drives/partitions.
Is Macrium suitable for these tasks? If not, then what you'd suggest?

For backing up folders, creating an image is simply not necessary. Copying the folders with verification ensures that read errors don't go undetected, and that the copied data matches the data on the source. That's why I recommend to use FastCopy, at least when it comes to copying folders to external storage.

Additionally, file hash codes can also be stored for later (re-) verification of the data. FastCopy also has a separate tool, FcHash.exe, that can be used to re-calculate file hash codes. So you can compare the re-calculated codes to the original codes to see if they still match. If they no longer do, it means that the file in question contains data that no longer is identical to the original data, so you could then decide to investigate why.

As another bonus, copying of folders effectively eliminates any dependencies on proprietary backup file formats. This also means that the copies can be accessed immediately on any working PC so all you need is to plug it in.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

misterpersister said:
Can you please clarify if you mean usage of VSS or you're speaking about Macrium in general?

I mean any snapshot-based backup [of Windows and applications] that is created while Windows is still actively running on the system. Booting to an isolated environment (WinRE/WinPE-based) is compulsory if the goal is to effectively eliminate the potential risk of errors/inconsistencies in the backup that may result from running processes interfering with the backup process. When I say running processes, I am not only referring to things like malware. Just because you closed all running applications before the backup job starts, doesn't necessarily also mean that there are no processes still running actively in the background. Also, closing applications and/or quitting background processes to try to mitigate these risks is still usually just a poor alternative choice to using the bootable Rescue Media, when the latter choice is still typically going to be quite fast enough if you have a modern NVMe SSD. This is especially if, like me, you don't see the benefit of making an incremental image of Windows and applications more frequently than just a few times per year on one or two computers.

Had there been more than a few computers, I would have taken the iPXE chainloading route. It takes some effort to set it up, but I am sure that it would have been worth. Another thing that I would have considered to use is the Acronis MVP Assistant 3.4.0 (download link at the bottom of this post).

misterpersister said:
If I should consider better (more reliable) backup software, could you please share what you'd use?

It depends. For how I use my 2 laptops, I would probably stick to my current methods. The reason why it depends is because backup reliability is directly related to security as a whole.

misterpersister said:
I mean, besides copying directories to external drives, I thought that versioned images (full, diff., incr.) is the way to go. If this approach is not good for any reason, please share your knowledge or some keywords so I can google and study how to do that better. Of course, I'm interested in reliability primarily (for system drive as well as for other separate folders), the second priority is space requirements, and the least important is speed. But, of course, not something inconveniently slow. Unless it's the only option while all the fast(er) ones are just so unreliable that they sabotage the whole purpose of backups.

The various copy modes of FastCopy are explained here. I recommend to read through the entire help page, then run a few tests and try to experiment with FastCopy. There is a learning curve, but it pays off nicely in the end.

kelper · Jan 10, 2025

@hdmi are you claiming that VSS is fallible? Macrium told me that a backup with Windows running is reliable. I normally boot into Macrium's recovery environment because it is quicker than runiing in Windows or booting from a USB SSD.

Winuser · Jan 10, 2025

telepro21 said:
Also, in regard to Image Guardian, one can use MR interface to remove this guard, temporarily, on a drive for things such as file deletion and modification.

From past experience I found that you can't modify or delete files from an image.

telepro21 · Jan 10, 2025

Winuser said:
From past experience I found that you can't modify or delete files from an image.

I agree.
I was referring to the ability to delete files contained on the drive, rather than those within an image file itself.
Thank you for helping me to clarify what it was that I was trying to say.

Winuser · Jan 10, 2025

Bree said:
True, and if (as I often do) you forget about this, then when MIG blocks you the popup gives you the option to go to MIG settings and change it on the fly.

The few times I tried, I couldn't make any changes to an image. The only thing I could do is delete it.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

kelper said:
@hdmi are you claiming that VSS is fallible?

Yes, I think I outlined that part of the equation in reasonable detail and without getting over-technical in my post here.

kelper said:
Macrium told me that a backup with Windows running is reliable.

I guess that a lot depends on what's your own personal definition of "reliable".

kelper said:
I normally boot into Macrium's recovery environment because it is quicker than runiing in Windows or booting from a USB SSD.

Yes, as long as you can be sure that the Macrium Reflect recovery environment is still working correctly, it should be equivalent to booting from Macrium Reflect's bootable Rescue Media. AFAIK the only difference (besides the time it takes to load) is that it uses a boot menu to eliminate the need to boot from USB (or DVD), although a USB drive with the bootable Rescue Media on it is still recommended to have so that you can still use that in the possible event that, e.g., the Macrium Reflect recovery environment is lost or gets corrupted somehow. Techie Tuesday: Adding a boot menu option for system image recovery

However, it being equivalent also means that when you use it to create an image, the verification process used will still be the same. As a result, the flaws that this verification process has will also be the same.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

Winuser said:
From past experience I found that you can't modify or delete files from an image.

Mount the image
Copy the content from the mounted image
Modify the copied content
Create a new image from the modified content.

Winuser · Jan 10, 2025

hdmi said:
Mount the image

Copy the content from the mounted image

Modify the copied content

Create a new image from the modified content.

That's not what I talking about. I'm talking about not being able to modify the existing image. Your way is creating a new image.

Bree · Jan 10, 2025

Winuser said:
From past experience I found that you can't modify or delete files from an image.

hdmi said:
Mount the image

Copy the content from the mounted image

Modify the copied content

Create a new image from the modified content.

That will only allow you to make a modified image of one single partition. Not that useful if you then want to restore the full image plus the changes to the physical machine.

No, you can't make any changes to a system image once it has been written. If you really need to though, there is a way to modify the complete system, adding/deleting files, installing/uninstalling software, etc., then make an image of the modified system.

Use viBoot to boot the image as a virtual machine, Hyper-V or VirtualBox are supported. Make your changes in the VM then shut down the VM. From within viBoot you can now make a backup. You can choose to make an Incremental, a Differential, or a Full backup. If you choose Incremental of Differential this will be added to the backup set of the image that you had booted from. It's then possible to restore this modified image and its incremental/differential to the original machine, or restore the new Full image if that's what you chose to make.

hdmi · Jan 10, 2025

Bree said:
That will only allow you to make a modified image of one single partition. Not that useful if you then want to restore the full image plus the changes to the physical machine.

No, you can't make any changes to a system image once it has been written. If you really need to though, there is a way to modify the complete system, adding/deleting files, installing/uninstalling software, etc., then make an image of the modified system.

Use viBoot to boot the image as a virtual machine, Hyper-V or VirtualBox are supported. Make your changes in the VM then shut down the VM. From within viBoot you can now make a backup. You can choose to make an Incremental, a Differential, or a Full backup. If you choose Incremental of Differential this will be added to the backup set of the image that you had booted from. It's then possible to restore this modified image and its incremental/differential to the original machine, or restore the new Full image if that's what you chose to make.

View attachment 121716 View attachment 121717

If all the modifications you want are trivial in the particular sense that making them doesn't actually require to boot the image, then I suppose you could always decide to just restore the partition(s) to a target that has enough unallocated space, then make the modifications you want, and then finally create a new image by selecting these partition(s) as the source.

How to copy backups to multiple drives? (the "3" in 3-2-1)

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