Windows 10: Looking for THE forum for Macrium Reflect 7.1

Hi, Nisko.

To hedge against falling victim to one incremental in a string of many being a weak link, I do my GFS backup scheme as follows:

• First Monday every month do a full backup
• Every Saturday do a differential backup
• Every day do an incremental backup

Retention policy - retain 7 incrementals, retain differentials for 13 weeks, retain all full backups and migrate the oldest ones (about a year old) to archival storage. My 4 TB external storage drive has plenty of room to hold the last year's images.

Of course, you see that the granularity of available restores begins to be reduced after a week has passed (begin deleting incrementals) and then reduces further after 13 weeks (begin deleting differentials). However, this serves my needs.

You could try variations of the above that suit your needs.

 

Thank you for your backup plan. What do you mean by "the GRANULARITY of available restores?" Oh, and what does GFS backup scheme mean? I'm not so good with abbreviations.

 

By "granularity" of available restores, I mean you have more choices, i.e., more frequent times to restore a backup from (incrementals often being most recent) in the last 7 days of backup scheme I described. Beyond 7 days, you have only fulls and differential restores to choose from, so the "granularity" of choices is reduced to only the weekly differentials at best. Beyond 13 weeks (in my case), you only have full backups to restore from, i.e., the "granularity" of choices is reduced to monthly full backups to restore from. I hope that's clearer.

GFS is just an abbreviation of "Grandfather Father Son" - it's one of the backup plan templates available to you (see Item 1. on the page you asked about in post # 7) in the dropdown list (click downward pointing triangle). The template name could just as well been "Full Differential Incremental" but I guess they went with the (admittedly gender specific / sexist ?) metaphor of human male generational relationships to be more descriptive. *Zip

 

Got it - thanks for the explanations.