Some coaching for a Macrium Reflect newcomer, please

Buddy said:

Next question:

Reading threads here, it seems that a popular practice is to keep data on a partition or physical drive separate from Windows and program installations. Backup is then an image of the system drive and, separately, either an image or file sync of the data partition or drive.

What I've got right now is this:
System and data are all on the C:\ drive.
Macrium image of the full drive taken monthly before Windows updates, daily incremental.
FreeFileSync data sync four times a day.
Both MR and FFS backups are run by scheduler, so I don't have to think about it.

If I were to partition the system SSD, move my data to its own drive partition, and drop it from the Macrium image job, I realize I'd have shorter backup times (once a month) for my full Macrium images, as well as smaller full and incremental image files. But, I'd lose some redundancy if I stopped including the data in the Macrium image.

It seems to me that some run time (unattended anyway) and some HDD space (I've got an excess of that) are less valuable than the redundancy. Your thoughts?

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You can see in "My Computers" that I too use laptops. I too have only C: SSD drives. Partitioning my C: drives would be a waste of time and would just build in some wasted unused space in the OS partition. For me, partitioning makes no sense. Besides, my last full backup of my C: drive on "System One" took exactly 5 minutes and 36 seconds. I make a full C: image of "System One" every day and since I'm multitasking I go off and do other things while the image runs. I store my images to a 2TB Samsung T7 Shield Portable SSD connected to one of my Thunderbolt 4 ports. I keep a running series of 5 stored images.

@TraderGary I was thinking of you when I was writing this post. My backup image is 185GB and takes about 30 minutes to write to a garden variety Seagate 6TB desktop USB HDD. The time isn't a big deal to me, since it's late in the evening, after I'm done for the day. If it ever gets aggravating or if I should decide to run the full more often, I'm leaning toward getting a proper Thunderbolt enclosure for a good SSD drive, unless Tbolt drives hit the market. Although Amazon has a pretty nice deal right now for the 1TB T7. Decisions...

Did you notice the Amazon deal on the new 4TB T7 Shield?

I just looked at the size of my last full C: image. 253,579,343 KB. It took 5 minutes 36 seconds.

@Buddy To partition or not is a matter of systems, configuration, and convenience.
- if a backup, full or other, takes 3 or 20 minutes and does not impact time then it does not matter
- if you rarely need to restore your OS then an extra 10 or 15 minutes to perform the operation then the time is likely inconsequential
- if you have lots of backup space to keep gobs of backup images then no issues

But you should have another backup of your important data on a second media, like cloud backup, otherwise you are SOL if that one PC with the original and backup was lost or destroyed.

Quandary said:

But you should have another backup of your important data on a second media, like cloud backup, otherwise you are SOL if that one PC with the original and backup was lost or destroyed.

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Completely agree and already addressed.

Today's post was focused on the data partition/backup time/storage space question. My current routine includes copying backups to a 2nd local drive and to Google Drive. Google Drive is impractical for the Macrium full image, given its size and upload time. I'm probably going to work up an offsite physical drive with the Macium images and the FFS file syncs and keep one of my two bootable rescue USB flash drives with it. Update it maybe weekly. Periodically test the bootable drives. Not all done yet, but coming soon.

TraderGary said:

Did you notice the Amazon deal on the new 4TB T7 Shield?

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That's a pretty good deal. About the same as a T-bolt enclosure and a good 2TB SSD, which you'd hope would be faster yet. I need to sit down with the calculator and figure how much image space I'll need. Currently set to retain 3 months worth of full and incremental. I just started that process two days ago, so I don't have much incremental history yet. Considering that my next buy will be my offsite drive (up to my ears in desktop drives already) and will spend its life hiding outside my house, the speed vs. cost tradeoff will probably tilt toward cost.

Looking at the size of your backup and the probable size of just your data, have you considered the convenience of taking advantage of Windows built in OneDrive automation for a real-time backup of your data. As previously stated that's my primary data backup.

I ran OneDrive for a while, but I find Google Drive a better fit for my needs and preferences. If I wanted real-time synch, I could do it with Google Drive, or in a more focused manner with RealTimeSync (part of FFS). FFS works not only with local drives, but also with Google Drive. I've tested both RTS and GD synch, but since I don't have multiple computers to keep in synch, I'm content with backup for now.

I can't imagine being without my Microsoft 365 and my OneDrive being an integral part of Windows.

Enjoy your quest to build the strategy that works for you.

Buddy said:

Currently set to retain 3 months worth of full and incremental. I just started that process two days ago, so I don't have much incremental history yet.

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Consider extending that strategy and keeping the oldest 3 month backup for maybe a year, so that your backups in 18 months look like this:
- Full backup for Current month
- Daily incremental backups for current month
- Full Backup for month -1
- Daily incremental backup for month -1
- Full Backup for month -2
- Daily incremental backup for month -2
- Full Backup for month -6
- Full Backup for month -12
- Full Backup for month -18

You just never know when you might want an older version of some file, or some infrequently used file that got accidentally deleted in the past 3 months. Some manual intervention will be required to move the oldest backup to a different folder as the the Macrium Definition file does not handle this.

I've long taken the view that I only want ONE set of data files and that any other computers should directly access that single database. So there are NO data files on any other computer in this house, everything works over mapped network drives. The precious database itself is triple protected with Windows File History; a local on-demand file backup for which I use WinRAR which I run as necessary but minimally once per day, and a cloud continuous data backup service provided by my ISP. The PC at the centre of all this has separate partitions for system and data and the system partition itself is protected by Macrium Reflect, as are all other computers. So no OneDrive here - not needed.

Buddy said:

Next question:

Reading threads here, it seems that a popular practice is to keep data on a partition or physical drive separate from Windows and program installations. Backup is then an image of the system drive and, separately, either an image or file sync of the data partition or drive.

What I've got right now is this:
System and data are all on the C:\ drive.
Macrium image of the full drive taken monthly before Windows updates, daily incremental.
FreeFileSync data sync four times a day.
Both MR and FFS backups are run by scheduler, so I don't have to think about it.

If I were to partition the system SSD, move my data to its own drive partition, and drop it from the Macrium image job, I realize I'd have shorter backup times (once a month) for my full Macrium images, as well as smaller full and incremental image files. But, I'd lose some redundancy if I stopped including the data in the Macrium image.

It seems to me that some run time (unattended anyway) and some HDD space (I've got an excess of that) are less valuable than the redundancy. Your thoughts?

Click to expand...

There is no right answer here. You have to work it out for your own situation. I myself do separate data and the OS as much as I can. My background is mainframes where the OS was always separate from data, upgrading the OS was even more difficult than Windows and was best done on separate volumes in a VM. This was carried over into our desktops and laptops where we had a standard image on the local drive and data was on a network share. I tend to carry that over to my home use. The amount of data I have built up over the years is too large to fit on a laptop drive so early on I moved my data off the laptop drive onto an external USB attached drive. I know this is problematic for a laptop so anything I need gets migrated to the laptop drive and is tied together using libraries. Since my laptop tends to be used as a desktop anyway that works for me.

Separating data has a couple of advantages.

1. Imaging is smaller and faster.
2. Restores don't have to worry about losing data and having to bring data up to date, just installed programs.
3 Since the recovery process is simpler the decision to use it is easier.

I have been taking the separation further just recently. I created a separate partition on the OS drive for things that don't need to be imaged. I use a lot of portable apps so that's where they live and are backed up with FFS. It also has browser caches. search indexes, and temporary files. Every so often I come across something else that can be moved there without adversely affecting the system. I now have moved around 40GB off the OS partition doing this.

@fixer I'm with different tools, but a similar plan, except that I'm a one-man, one-computer situation, so I don't need cloud sync a la OneDrive or NAS or mapped network drives. Cloud (Google Drive in my case) is, for me, a form of off-site backup storage, not a real time sync across PCs.

@Quandary I might just do that. My coarse calcs are that I'd need about 1.6 to 1.7 TB for full-drive images in your scheme. There's another 500GB in archived (no longer in use) data and about 200 GB in data that needs to be accessible now. All these would live on my primary backup drive, which is 6TB so plenty of room. I'd want to replicate that with an offsite drive for safety. Just a bit out of reach for a 2TB SSD, dang it. If I set a separate data partition, the images are much smaller. But, as I said in the earlier post, it loses a bit of redundancy. And yes, there would likely be some manual work to keep it all going. Yet another Google Calendar prompt, I'd guess.

@kado897 I was an application programmer on mainframes in the early 70s, so I get your outlook. Your reason #2 could be the one that tilts me to partition the data separately. I've tried to picture a restore and what I'd do to get my data back to where it was, given the likely changes after the most recent full or incremental in Macrium. But I have ALL my data in backed up in native format, created by FFS. I think all I'd have to do is a compare and sync for the whole mess, from the data backup to the newly restored drive. Piece of cake for FFS. There must be a hole in this thinking - nothing ever works out that neatly.

Buddy said:

@fixer I'm with different tools, but a similar plan, except that I'm a one-man, one-computer situation, so I don't need cloud sync a la OneDrive or NAS or mapped network drives. Cloud (Google Drive in my case) is, for me, a form of off-site backup storage, not a real time sync across PCs.

@Quandary I might just do that. My coarse calcs are that I'd need about 1.6 to 1.7 TB for full-drive images in your scheme. There's another 500GB in archived (no longer in use) data and about 200 GB in data that needs to be accessible now. All these would live on my primary backup drive, which is 6TB so plenty of room. I'd want to replicate that with an offsite drive for safety. Just a bit out of reach for a 2TB SSD, dang it. If I set a separate data partition, the images are much smaller. But, as I said in the earlier post, it loses a bit of redundancy. And yes, there would likely be some manual work to keep it all going. Yet another Google Calendar prompt, I'd guess.

@kado897 I was an application programmer on mainframes in the early 70s, so I get your outlook. Your reason #2 could be the one that tilts me to partition the data separately. I've tried to picture a restore and what I'd do to get my data back to where it was, given the likely changes after the most recent full or incremental in Macrium. But I have ALL my data in backed up in native format, created by FFS. I think all I'd have to do is a compare and sync for the whole mess, from the data backup to the newly restored drive. Piece of cake for FFS. There must be a hole in this thinking - nothing ever works out that neatly.

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Reversing the FFS backups is the way I would do it too. There is a facility to do that although I have to admit not having tried it..

Buddy said:

Your reason #2 could be the one that tilts me to partition the data separately. I've tried to picture a restore and what I'd do to get my data back to where it was, given the likely changes after the most recent full or incremental in Macrium. But I have ALL my data in backed up in native format, created by FFS.

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Here is one extreme situation to justify keeping data separate from the OS. Even with daily data backups, no live cloud syncing, there is period where you data has changed. At this point something dramatic happens to your C: drive (virus, damaged file system from power outage, etc), and you need to restore. All those data changes will be lost. Yes, this situation could happen to a separate logical data drive, but statistically that is less than with a combined OS and data drive.
There would also be value, and additional complexities, is separating a huge amount of data into different logical drives.

@Quandary Thanks for your comments. I can't begin to say how much and how quickly I've learned from everyone on this forum sharing their thoughts and experience.

There is a second, partial, solution, that I've already tried. FreeFileSync has a component called RealTimeSync. You kick it off at boot to watch target directories and their subdirectories. When something changes, it gets backed up right then. You can choose, as I do, to keep a version history on those backups. I've tried it, pointing at the handful of things that are my bread and butter work that I'd hate to lose work done between the scheduled backups. It works as advertised. To me, it's better than a cloud sync because it's a one-direction backup and (more importantly) you get to keep a history. I'll revisit it with your comments in mind.

For me on a laptop and no desktop, the data drive would be a partition. I'm not obsessing over it enough to want to travel with a removable data drive. So, a drive crash (for whatever reason) could hit both OS and data. But so many of the stories that I see on this forum about needing to restore are brought on by malware or a nasty Windows update or the system otherwise somehow getting its shorts in a wad. In that case, you're dead on target.

TraderGary said:

Did you notice the Amazon deal on the new 4TB T7 Shield?

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B&H Photo matching Amazon. Or is it the other way around?

Hi. I'm also new to Macrium Reflect and would appreciate some guidance too please. I am considering purchasing the 4 Licence version of Macrium reflect for home use. If you are creating Bootable Rescue Media on a USB drive, is it necessary to create a separate media on a separate USB drive for each PC or will one USB drive work with all four licences? Also, should we allow Macrium to add Rescue Media to the boot menu if we need to restore an image? At present we use the Windows 7 Backup and Restore option, which hasn't let us down before, but I realise it's not without its' issues.
Thanks for the advice.

Mitch said:

Hi. I'm also new to Macrium Reflect and would appreciate some guidance too please. I am considering purchasing the 4 Licence version of Macrium reflect for home use. If you are creating Bootable Rescue Media on a USB drive, is it necessary to create a separate media on a separate USB drive for each PC or will one USB drive work with all four licences? Also, should we allow Macrium to add Rescue Media to the boot menu if we need to restore an image? At present we use the Windows 7 Backup and Restore option, which hasn't let us down before, but I realise it's not without its' issues.
Thanks for the advice.

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Drivers are likely to be the problem with using the same rescue media on more than one machine. The only way to be sure is to create a rescue stick and try it.
Personally I do create the boot menu on my machines. Unless your disk is failing it is much more convenient and also means that you can start a restore from within Windows and MR will reboot directly into the recovery environment but on the other hand it does add an extra step to every startup.