Does Macrium keep track of existing backups across multiple backup drives?

[Billiam29]

I've found information about features within Macrium Reflect for creating backups onto multiple drives. What I have not found any information on is how reflect handles keeping track of such backups across multiple drives, or if it even does at all.

Here's a hypothetical to help clarify what I'm asking:

• Let's say I run backups onto three drives: [BUdrive-A] [BUdrive-B] [BUdrive-C]
• For simplicity's sake, assume the contents of what I'm backing up is the same across all three drives. I'm just rotating through the drives and keeping one off site.
• For whatever reason, I come to find I need to restore a file or folder from a specific date range.

Does the Reflect app itself allow me to determine which of my three backup drives contains a backup of the needed file/folder in the date range I'm looking for without needing to have all three backup drives in front of me and mounting each of them in Windows?

To phrase the question in a more practical manner...
If I need to restore D:\Photos\Montana from six weeks ago, do I need to round up all three of my backup drives and manually go through them one-by-one or will Reflect tell me "D:\Photos\Montana from six weeks ago is on [BUdrive-B]" without needing to actually mount the [BUdrive-B] disk in Windows?

 

[XiaoDeer]

As far as I can tell, Reflect does not store/track the DiskID or Volume Name of the destination drive. Just the pathname to the backup.

It will probably help if you adopt a naming convention for your backup sets, something like:

YYYYMMDD-SRCfooDESTbar

e.g.: 20240801-SRCmyphotosDESTbackdiskC

 

[Chris Noble]

I've found information about features within Macrium Reflect for creating backups onto multiple drives. What I have not found any information on is how reflect handles keeping track of such backups across multiple drives, or if it even does at all.

Here's a hypothetical to help clarify what I'm asking:

• Let's say I run backups onto three drives: [BUdrive-A] [BUdrive-B] [BUdrive-C]
• For simplicity's sake, assume the contents of what I'm backing up is the same across all three drives. I'm just rotating through the drives and keeping one off site.
• For whatever reason, I come to find I need to restore a file or folder from a specific date range.

Does the Reflect app itself allow me to determine which of my three backup drives contains a backup of the needed file/folder in the date range I'm looking for without needing to have all three backup drives in front of me and mounting each of them in Windows?

To phrase the question in a more practical manner...
If I need to restore D:\Photos\Montana from six weeks ago, do I need to round up all three of my backup drives and manually go through them one-by-one or will Reflect tell me "D:\Photos\Montana from six weeks ago is on [BUdrive-B]" without needing to actually mount the [BUdrive-B] disk in Windows?

No. Macrium compares the current state of your files with the most recent backup on the target backup drive, figures out the differences, and backs those up to the same drive.

Every backup drive is its own backup set.

"Rotating" backup drives means that you don't have real backup redundancy. Bad idea. Do the same backup to two drives. One of mine is local and the other is in the cloud.

 

[CAcreeks]

To phrase the question in a more practical manner...
will Reflect tell me "D:\Photos\Montana from six weeks ago is on [BUdrive-B]" without needing to actually mount the [BUdrive-B] disk in Windows?

No. Macrium compares the current state of your files with the most recent backup on the target backup drive, figures out the differences, and backs those up to the same drive.

Every backup drive is its own backup set.

"Rotating" backup drives means that you don't have real backup redundancy. Bad idea. Do the same backup to two drives. One of mine is local and the other is in the cloud.

Does Macrium use the Windows "recent files" API to discover what files have changed? I kinda doubt it, because Macrium is slow when making current-state to backup comparison. Before we stopped using it, a full backup would start at 04:00 and sometimes still be going in late AM. For < 1TB data on laptop HDD.

FreeFileSync is very speedy in comparison, although we're using it with target SSD instead of HDD. Maybe it uses "recent files" list. Not sure if this is the API, from Stackoverflow:

string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Recent);
var files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(path);

 

[Chris Noble]

To phrase the question in a more practical manner...
will Reflect tell me "D:\Photos\Montana from six weeks ago is on [BUdrive-B]" without needing to actually mount the [BUdrive-B] disk in Windows?

No. Macrium compares the current state of your files with the most recent backup on the target backup drive, figures out the differences, and backs those up to the same drive.

Every backup drive is its own backup set.

"Rotating" backup drives means that you don't have real backup redundancy. Bad idea. Do the same backup to two drives. One of mine is local and the other is in the cloud.

Does Macrium use the Windows "recent files" API to discover what files have changed? I kinda doubt it, because Macrium is slow when making current-state to backup comparison. Before we stopped using it, a full backup would start at 04:00 and sometimes still be going in late AM. For < 1TB data on laptop HDD.

FreeFileSync is very speedy in comparison, although we're using it with target SSD instead of HDD. Maybe it uses "recent files" list. Not sure if this is the API, from Stackoverflow:

string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Recent);
var files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(path);

My automated Macrium nightly incremental backup takes about 10 minutes, over a slow connection (100 MBPS Ethernet to a NAS). Including building the changed-file table. I do full backups once every 6 weeks over Thunderbolt. About 20 min per TB? Including verification. I don't measure it precisely.

There's info on the Macrium website about how they keep track of file changes, but I must admit I don't pay attention to that. All I know is that it's worked flawlessly for many years, every time I've had to do a partial or full restore to some past timestamp.

 

[CAcreeks]

Does Macrium use the Windows "recent files" API to discover what files have changed? I kinda doubt it, because Macrium is slow when making current-state to backup comparison. Before we stopped using it, a full backup would start at 04:00 and sometimes still be going in late AM. For < 1TB data on laptop HDD.

FreeFileSync is very speedy in comparison, although we're using it with target SSD instead of HDD. Maybe it uses "recent files" list. Not sure if this is the API, from Stackoverflow:

string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Recent);
var files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(path);

My automated Macrium nightly incremental backup takes about 10 minutes, over a slow connection (100 MBPS Ethernet to a NAS). Including building the changed-file table. I do full backups once every 6 weeks over Thunderbolt. About 20 min per TB? Including verification. I don't measure it precisely.

There's info on the Macrium website about how they keep track of file changes, but I must admit I don't pay attention to that. All I know is that it's worked flawlessly for many years, every time I've had to do a partial or full restore to some past timestamp.

Thanks, Chris. Our problem could be USB-2, or slow external HDD, or failure to change some default setting(s). Just seems like it should have been faster given the relatively small amount of data. FreeFileSync was a good discovery for us.

 

[Chris Noble]

Does Macrium use the Windows "recent files" API to discover what files have changed? I kinda doubt it, because Macrium is slow when making current-state to backup comparison. Before we stopped using it, a full backup would start at 04:00 and sometimes still be going in late AM. For < 1TB data on laptop HDD.

FreeFileSync is very speedy in comparison, although we're using it with target SSD instead of HDD. Maybe it uses "recent files" list. Not sure if this is the API, from Stackoverflow:

string path = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Recent);
var files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(path);

My automated Macrium nightly incremental backup takes about 10 minutes, over a slow connection (100 MBPS Ethernet to a NAS). Including building the changed-file table. I do full backups once every 6 weeks over Thunderbolt. About 20 min per TB? Including verification. I don't measure it precisely.

There's info on the Macrium website about how they keep track of file changes, but I must admit I don't pay attention to that. All I know is that it's worked flawlessly for many years, every time I've had to do a partial or full restore to some past timestamp.

Thanks, Chris. Our problem could be USB-2, or slow external HDD, or failure to change some default setting(s). Just seems like it should have been faster given the relatively small amount of data. FreeFileSync was a good discovery for us.

I only run Macrium at night, but even if it was slow, it runs in the background. So not an issue. Also, I like my backups compressed and encrypted.