Windows 7: Imaging strategies

Right Michael. You never 'retire' as long as you do something useful. Just one little correction - I do not 'run' the computer club, I am an instructor at the club. Running a club with over 800 members is a big job. There are a lot of little ladies that have nothing else to do than shower you with a lot of BS. Plus all the logistics, etc. I leave that to the (relatively) younger people. Here is our website http://www.hernandocomputerclub.org/

I plan to stay as busy as physically possible during retirement. What will be nice is having the financial freedom to engage in activities I like doing.

Does anyone know much about Easeus ToDo backup? I've been using Macrium Free but my space is limited so I can only keep 2 or 3 full backups. I've noticed Easeus free version does incremental and differential images. Wondering if anyone had tried it out?

Haven't tried out Easeus. However if the back-up that it produces is a sector by sector copy of the drive like Acronis does, then there wont be much difference in size between the full, incremental and differential images particularly if the drive has been defragmented in between.

Hi Wanchoo, I'm just trying it out now. It can do Sector by sector or without. I've backed up my 350mb SysReserved and 55GB windows drive, without Sector by sector and the backup image size is 20GB.
Does it make a lot of difference to the restore if it's sector by sector?

If case you have an option to create a non-sector by sector differential image then it should be very much smaller as compared to a sector by sector differential image. Please advise me the results.

It is my guess that there should really be no difference in the restoration times between the two types of images.

Does anyone know if it's possible to assign a retention policy to Macrium image backups? They are quickly buidling up and chewing away at my internal HDD space. I think 2 weeks would be adequate on my internal HDD.

Then the next question is how to automatically transfer a weekly backup to my external HDD for long-term retention? Maybe there's a batch file (someone wants to share) that I can schedule via to copy / move the file?

As far as I know, there is no way to schedule the retention time in free Macrium.

But in your case, why don't you image to the external disk in the first place - at least every other time. Wouldn't that be easier. If you are concerned about the time it takes, let it run in the background and do something else in the meantime.

Spreading the images regularily over 2 disks gives you added security too in case one of the disks fails.

I run my Macrium disk image at 4:00AM when I'm sleeping - no worries about time to run the job.
I like having backups on more than one HDD - just in case. The scheduling functionality of Macrium is somewhat limited. It would be better if you could schedule based on day of the week and do as you said, have backups alternate days between different physical HDD's. Lack of a retention policy is surprising. That's a critical feature for backup. Does Macrium utilize a FIFO strategy to delete images if the disk fills up? If that's the case I can set my partition to the max size I'd like to consume for backup and let HDD capacity dictate my retention.

Does the paid for version of Macrium offer more features in this area?

Thanks WHS. As always, very helpful.

1. You can schedule it on any day of the week and any time. See picture. And it is nifty because you can also schedule the start date and you can skip weeks.

2. What you do is schedule each XML seperately.

3. There is no FiFo strategy - or any other space management. When the space is full, it refuses to make more images. The space you have to manage yourself.

4. To tell you the truth, I have never used the Pro version. Not sure what it offers in addition. See here whether there is anything you like: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx