Does a harddrive image backup interfere with incremental backup process?

[Bob F]

Using the backup facilities of windows 7, would doing an image backup of the
harddrive interfere with scheduled incremental backups backing up all the
changed files?

I was checking out a friends backup scheme, and thought that having a second
external drive for occsaional image backups would be a good idea. That drive
would be stored elsewhere, as opposed to the drive she uses connected to the PC
all the time.

My worry is that the image backup might change the bits that tell the other
scheduled backup whether it should include files as "changed" from the last
pass. I'm not sure that is how current backups are regulated these days.

Would using a program like the Seagate Diskwizard for the image backup make any
difference?

Pointers to pages discussing these issues could be helpful also.

 

[Jack Toff]

Let's see. You are asking a Windows 7 question in a close to defunct
Windows XP newsgroup. DUH!

 

[Yousuf Khan]

Using the backup facilities of windows 7, would doing an image backup of the
harddrive interfere with scheduled incremental backups backing up all the
changed files?

I was checking out a friends backup scheme, and thought that having a second
external drive for occsaional image backups would be a good idea. That drive
would be stored elsewhere, as opposed to the drive she uses connected to the PC
all the time.

My worry is that the image backup might change the bits that tell the other
scheduled backup whether it should include files as "changed" from the last
pass. I'm not sure that is how current backups are regulated these days.

Would using a program like the Seagate Diskwizard for the image backup make any
difference?

Pointers to pages discussing these issues could be helpful also.

I use Macrium Reflect for my backups. It can do both regular backups and
image backups. It can even do incremental image backups. When they do
the incremental backups, these backup programs consult with a file
system bitmap called the NTFS Master File Table, that lists files that
have changed or not. I think this is just a global table, and once a
backup program goes through and resets it, it'll affect the next backup
program's view of the file system too. So it's best if you just use one
program for both image backups and regular backups. Or just use a
program that can do incremental image backups, and then you won't have
to worry about it.

Yousuf Khan

 

[Bob F]

My overall guiding principle is to make all really important
backups total. No incremental backups. Any backup I have
made, including, yes, those on media stored offsite, are
self-contained and individually sufficient to recover from
a disaster.

The reason for incremental backup, in my mind, is to catch the little day-to-day
changes, which seems like a good idea since a full image takes quite a bit of
time. Up until recently, I did use only full image backups myself, but lost a
few things when the "WindowsRepair" thing got me.

 

[BillW50]

In

Seconded! (No incrementals, and no differentials.


Takes quite a bit of time??? I guess that depends on your setup.
Over here it takes me less than 10 minutes to image my C: partition
(which has about 20 GB of programs and data on it), and that's for a
single composite image file. I don't think it's worth taking the
chance with using incremental or differential backups, which depend
on the integrity of other extra files. Sure, I'd grant you it's a
bit faster, but I can wait 10 minutes for a full, self contained
backup file.

All of this talk about backups and over the years, there is one detail
that is often overlooked.

That is, does the restore actually work?

Sadly, I have found that some actually don't. And for years I would
backup, remove my hard drive and throw in a spare and try to restore. If
it worked, great! If not, figure what went wrong. But this was very time
consuming.

I got smarter! Now I clone my drives. And then use the clone as the new
master. Now I will know if something went wrong since I use it daily.
The original drive is now kept as a backup and I know that one works
too. Since I use laptops, I bought extra drive caddies and drives. So
swapping hard drives are just as easy as swapping batteries. Everything
is so much easier this way.

 

[BillW50]

In

Yes, at least in my case! And I use it quite a lot, since I mess
around a bit with my system, and like to fall back to a cleaner
backup. Obviously unless one has really tested it though, that
could be an issue.

I have had many that would restore just fine. So you start to feel
confident and stop testing them. And that is when you will get burned.
:-(

Swapping hard drives using a caddy sounds tempting. But then again,
I like the simplicity of just restoring a generational image stored
on one other drive, without having to physically swap hard drives. I
only have a desktop here though.

Can be done on desktops too! Search for "removable drive bay" and there
are lots of them out there.

Unlike you, Bill, I haven't had any issue with (at least this older
version of) Acronis True Image Home. But I would be shy about
mixing versions there, so I stay with the version I've got, which I
know always works.

Well I now added another Acronis True Image Home 2011. Was using ATIH
2009 before. And they are so basically alike, I don't know why I
bothered getting and trying a newer version. I probably should have
tried the trial version first. :-(

I do still use ATI for cloning drives (sometimes I use Paragon).
Although ATI can't clone live (Paragon can). And I find this so very odd
of ATI. As if you can backup live (ATI can), then it should be able to
clone live too.

 

[BillW50]

In

I'm using ATI True Home "version 11", which came out around 2008. I
guess they changed their numbering schemes and started using the year
after mine, starting with ATIH 2009 after my version "11".

Why did you upgrade? I'm guessing it was because you were having some
issues with ATIH 2009, which is newer than mine. At the time I
didn't want to upgrade as it just looked like they were adding more
features that I had no use for.

Yes I was having issues with 2009. And I have the WD and Seagate
versions of ATI, which one is v10 and v11 I believe. I haven't used them
in a while, but the problem was there too.

Maybe due to a system drive letter and windows boot drive assignment
issue, assuming you're talking about cloning C: With a image
backup, which just stores a single composite image file so that's
probably a non issue, but with a clone backup, it might be (since you
can boot up on a clone, but not an image file by itself). Just
guessing, though. But evidently some companies like Paragon and
perhaps Casper? have worked that out, but not ATI, which I think was
mainly designed for imaging.

Yes, when you clone a NT OS, it remembers the original drive letter of
the new drive. And when you clone the original to another drive, that
will boot up thinking it should be something other than Drive C. And
Windows will try to boot up looking for files in Drive C and can't find
them.

The old trick was to rewrite the MBR with FDISK /MBR. As there was a bug
(or feature) that overwrites part of the drive serial number (or ID or
whatever). Thus Windows has no memory of this drive and assigns it Drive
C like it should.

Paragon seems to have another method. As it unassigns whatever drive
letter to this new drive (only for cloning). And when you boot it up for
the first time, Windows calls it drive C.