Windows 10: Macrium Reflect never sees my full backup when attempting the differential

This used to work, and it broke a few months ago. I use Macrium Reflect to backup a few things from my W10 machine to external USB hard drives. One, an image of my internal D:/ drive, runs a full backup and then is supposed to run a differential backup every weekday. When these differentials run, they fail with the error "Backup Aborted! - Error reading Image file." The full backup completes without error, but then these diffs fail after a few moments. The drive is connected and visible to Windows with the proper drive letter, and I can see the full image file where it belongs.

I un/re-installed Macrium Reflect, preserving the definition files, with no change in the outcome.

Any ideas where I should check? Is something within Windows preventing Reflect from seeing the file properly?

It's Windows 10 Home, v 1903, build 18362.476.

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:)

 

Restoring Windows 10 Image using Macrium Reflect


In addition to the above. Here's my suggestion in step by step.
I assume you have Macrium Installed in your current HD and already made a backup copy.

1. Connect your new HD via USB port and boot up.
2. Run Macrium, click on Restore tab then select the Backup Image that you made to restore
3. click on "select a different target disk" then select your new HD as destination
   
   
   
4. Proceed to restore then Shutdown and disconnect the old HD and replace with the new HD
5. Boot up with your new HD.

 

Question on Macrium backups

Short answer:

This is not about archive bit, it's all about a backup plan; if the Sunday and Wednesday full backups belong to same backup set, a differential image when restored restores the last full backup regardless if it's your Sunday full or Wednesday full, then the last differential backup.

In other words, archive bit has nothing to do with Macrium Reflect backup.

If your Wednesday full backup files have a different backup definition (the 16 character hexadecimal part of the filename) than your Sunday full / every other day differential set, then it's exactly as it should be. The Wednesday full will not be used when the original plan's differential will be restored.

Somewhat longer answer:

Let's say that you created a full backup now on Sunday, today Tuesday a differential, tomorrow Wednesday again a full backup, on Thursday a differential and so on.

If you now restore the differential made on Tuesday, it restores itself and full from Sunday. If you restore the Thursday differential, it picks up besides itself the full from Wednesday. This is not because Wednesday full backup cleared the archive bit, it is because both Sunday and Wednesday full backups belong to the same backup plan.

A backup set is a set of full, differential and incremental backups. When you created your first backup with Macrium Reflect you were asked to name that backup set (backup plan):





The file names of each backup file in each backup set have the same hexadecimal string as filename, followed by digits. Below an extract from Macrium Reflect tutorial here at Ten Forums, its Part Four Step 8:

What you want to achieve is simply done by creating a new backup plan for your Wednesday full backup. This puts the Wednesday full backups to a new backup set, without any whatsoever connection to your other backup set. Macrium Reflect is an intelligent application, by default it assumes you want to create a new plan and prompts for the name:





If you now give a new plan name, the backup will belong to new backup set with a different filename. To include this backup to your existing backup set you would need to browse and select the name of that set.

How backup sets are created and maintained - KnowledgeBase - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

I might have misunderstood the highlighted part in above quote, but just to be sure I want to add this:

You don't have to restore first the last full image and then the last differential image. Simply restore the last differential image, it will automatically restore last full it finds belonging to same set, thereafter itself.

Restoring first a full image is completely unnecessary.

 

Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect  


This might help explain it. I run a backup everyday and this shows the last 7 days.

The first in the list is a the base image, that is always a full backup whichever method (incremental or differential) you choose
to do later.

So the base image is 18Gb in size, and the following images up to and including the 13th Feb are all incrementals. You can see how small they all are.

On the 14th (today) I made a differential image (look how big it is) and then installed todays W10 updates. Following that I made another differential image. Again it is big because these last two images look back to that base image as a reference.

Had I used incrementals for the last two then they would have been smaller but crucially they would also rely on all the others in the chain being intact.

The differentials are 'stand alone' images needing only the base image and the differential to perform a restore and so I usually finish the set off with a differential.

Tomorrow will see a new sequence started and this set will be archived.