Windows 10: How long do your image backups take - Full Disk vs Diff vs Increment?

Just wanting to get an idea of backup completion times from other users out here...

I use the forum favorite Macrium Reflect for my image backups. Last night I ran a full image backup of my C: & D: drives and it took approx 2 hrs & 50 mins for a full disk backup + image verification. Total amount of data was ~450GB compressed to a MReflect 350GB image. It was clear the bottleneck during the transfer was my 2TB My Passport as my boot & storage drives are an M.2 1TB NVMe SSD & a 2.5" 500GB SSD respectively.

So, how long do your backups take on average & how often do you do these? Please state what program you use as well as the storage mediums you have as the source & destination (e.g tradition external HDD or a off-site/on-site NAS hardwired). And would also like to know if others use the image verification feature as well. *Smile

:)

 

Do you prefer incremental or differential backups?


Restoring a differential backup requires 2 files., whereas restoring an incremental backup requires you have n files where n is as many as there are to date.

Maintaining space on the image destination should then be easier with differential backups. Imagine you have base image, diff1, diff2, diff3 and you want to create diff4 but your disk is getting a bit full. So you can delete diff 1- no problem.

With incrementals, I seem to recall noting you can consolidate a set of incrementals. So that wouldn't be so obvious.

Macrium R requires you purchase a license to get incremental imaging. Differential is free.

Just a couple of angles on the topic- you need to work out a backup regime you personally are comfortable with.

 

Incremental backup programs

The Free version does differential backups which is quite adequate for small differences.

A diff backup contains all the changes since last full backup.

So if Full had File A version 1 and diff had File A version 2, then if you restore Full backup, you get File A version 1. If you select the Diff (+full) backup, you get File A version 2.

 

How does Macrium's incremental backup feature work?


Suppose you do a full backup with files A, B, C, D and later you add File E to PC and create an incremental backup, it will add file E only to the incremental backup. Next day, you add F to PC, and create a second incremental backup containing file F. On day 3, you delete file B from PC - the incremental file stores a delete file B command in the incremental.

So you gt a chain of files linked together starting with the full backup and when you do a restore, you choose up to which incremental you want to restore to.

The free version does not do incremental files but does differential files. This is similar but works cumulatively.

Each day you do a differential backup, it stores all changes since the last full backup NOT since last incremental.

So Diff 1 contains E, Diff 2 E+F, Diff 3 E+F-B etc.

So diffs are less space efficient BUT you only need one diff at selected date and the full backup to restore to the selected date.

Problem with incs if one fails, all later incs are useless. With diffs, this problem is much less of an issue.

To be honest, unless you create masses of data, diffs are easier to and less confusing to follow. For most domestic users, diffs are perfectly adequate as the difis will be relatively small.