Macrium Reflect Query

[Philtor]

Hi Folks

I have been using Macrium Reflect to take a system image of my boot drive for a while now and always just selected the option 'create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore windows'.

This always created a single file but something must have changed recently as this is what I get now:



Any idea what is going on here? I always just start over each time and create a brand new image rather than doing any sort of incremental type thing btw.

Thanks

 

[bremen1874]

They all have the same identifier so you're presumably creating differential or incremental images. The file sizes will tell you a lot.

 

[Philtor]

Ok thanks. Will need to get a proper look as I don’t think I changed any settings from previous times.

There was an update to Macrium not long back so thinking that has done something perhaps.

 

[this_is_gav]

Any idea what is going on here? I always just start over each time and create a brand new image rather than doing any sort of incremental type thing btw.
Thanks

It does look like incremental or differential backups and there's really no reason not to use them. If needed you can then select any restore point (or individual file revision) from the original backup, the latest backup or anywhere in between, and they cost a fraction of a full backup in terms of both time needed to create the backup and disk space required.

Certainly for a data/media drive regular incremental backups make complete sense. For a Windows backup or all-in-one drive then it depends on how much space is available on the destination drive, as Windows and game updates can add a lot to an image size, though if you have that space then regular incremental backups are still the way to go.

 

[Philtor]

Ok many thanks. I will have a play about with Macrium and learn how to use it properly I think

I was a little confused when it presented me with 6 files and I was only expecting 1 just.

 

[this_is_gav]

Thinking about it some more it could be that you're backing up to a FAT32 drive which would restrict file sizes to 4GB, so any backup larger than that would be split into multiple files - Reflect does this automatically if it detects a FAT32 destination.

The other thing is ensuring you haven't checked the option for "Fixed file size for the image" in the advanced options when you go to do a backup - you could have changed this in the defaults (Other Tasks > Reflect Defaults), which again would split backups into multiple files.

Note that I have Reflect 6, so if you have Reflect 7 some options might be labelled differently.

Edit: Terrible English.

 

[Philtor]

Thinking about it some more it could be that you're backing up to a FAT32 drive which would restrict file sizes to 4GB, so any backup larger than that would be split into multiple files - Reflect does this automatically if it detects a FAT32 destination.

The other thing is ensuring you haven't checked the option for "Fixed file size for the image" in the advanced options when you go to do a backup - you could have changed this in the defaults (Other Tasks > Reflect Defaults), which again would split backups into multiple files.

Note that I have Reflect 6, so if you have Reflect 7 some options might be labelled differently.

Edit: Terrible English.

I think you have got it Gav! I had used a brand new flash drive which will have been formatted as FAT32 by default!

Thanks for your help. I will format it as NTFS and learn how to use Macrium properly

 

[Philtor]

That’s what it was... file size restriction with FAT32 so all sorted

One last question.. when I select 'create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore windows' I assume this also includes any applications I have installed as well and not just the bare bones Windows 10 install?

 

[this_is_gav]

I don't know if it's different in Reflect 7, but I just make an image of the whole disk ("Image selected disks on this computer"). That backs up all partitions on that drive.

A full backup of the whole disk means if you have an issue you can either restore the whole disk back to the exact state it was in when you made the backup, or you can mount the drive as a virtual drive and navigate it as such in Windows Explorer, copying out individual files or folders.

 

[Philtor]

Ok thanks again Gav!