In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

If each backup is using 800GB, with compression, I’d suggest that you are not doing incremental backups.

Disk space down to 20% free probably impinges on backup speed somewhat, but not to the extent you describe. Do you format the disks before the backups?

I usually delete and trim the SSDs of old backups. HDDs just delete old snapshots.

Just tried to restore a disk selectively with Acronis True Image and it failed at 75% wiping the hard disk. Fortunately Foxclone came to the rescue and restored successfully. Wont be subscribing to Acronis.

Keep to the 3-2-1 rule of backups and most importantly; regularly test 👍

That's a good demonstration of the dangers that DFScale pointed out of using cloning rather than backing up. (That's apart from the immense time saving of using a proper backup program.)

But it's good to test your backups. Too many people forget that aspect.

I spent many years managing backups for an international corporation and I am firmly of the belief that the best policy is a continuous backup system, where any changed files - and only changed files - are regularly saved and a certain number of generations of each file kept. (Obviously there is an initial phase when every file is saved.) I had the advantage of using very sophisticated backup software (IBM's Tivolli) which stored initial backups on disk and also to a tape library. When the disk storage was filling up files were shifted to the tape library. (And, of course, copies of the tapes were moved offsite every day.) Backups of a huge total amount of data from roundabout 1,000 users were almost instantaneous, despite the fact that they were happening over a - by today's standards - slow network, and any recently deleted files could be retrieved in a matter of minutes. That was very popular with my users.

This is much the way that Apple's Time Manager works; it is by far the best personal backup software (and it's free!). Similar programs exist for Windows and Linux.

Backups serve two purposes: 1. Disaster recovery. Very rarely needed in practice; 2. Recovery of corrupted or accidently deleted data. Far more common. Cloning programs address the first use, but not the second. Backup programs address both, but make disaster recovery slightly more complicated. To me that doesn't matter as it is such a rare scenario.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Keep to the 3-2-1 rule of backups and most importantly; regularly test 👍

Ted Rogers and Dusty Bin?

Well just done a complete system backup x2 with Macrium Reflect to HDDs and it took 4 hours each. 2 hours to backup and 2 hours to verify - not taking any chances. Will test later. Good thing about Macrium is you can mount the backup and extract individual files if needed from each drive and it is free or was.

Macrium failed to restore the partition table so non booting machine. Back to FoxClone to restore sanity.

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Keep to the 3-2-1 rule of backups and most importantly; regularly test 👍

Amen

Back it up
Back it up
Back it up

So I have decided on my backup routine. I will do a full Foxclone image once a month possibly to SSD as it is less likely to have bad blocks which my 3TB WD have despite only being powered on for 2 years. I will do a weekly differential with Macrium now that I have a base backup as it only takes about 30 minutes to do a diff and they can be restored fairly quickly or individual files can be picked out of the backup.

Had to retire one of my 3TB WDs (I have 4) as when I was running a backup with Macrium it disappeared from the system and Macrium said backup aborted nothing to write to. This might have happened with Acronis as it was the same disk but Acronis didn't complain. Why it did this I suspect overheating. Anyway now retired.