Macrium Reflect-Incremental Backup Problem

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I had a full backup plus 2 incrementals of my Windows 10 disc. All 3 images were verified and verification was OK. Also I could mount all 3 using Macrium Reflect. However, when I tried to make a further incremental backup Macrium said it was making a full backup as there was no image set to append the incremental backup to, which makes no sense, so I cancelled the full backup.

I referred the problem to Macrium Support and sent them all the information they asked for. They referred me to a tutorial on their website but none of the suggestions in that helped. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Macrium but it made no difference.

Does anyone have a fix for this? (The problem also arises when I try to make an incremental backup of my D drive, but if I make incrementals of other drives and then select incremental for my D drive it works).

Help would be appreciated.

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I’d be inclined to simply make another full backup, then try the incremental again, and if that works forget the current backups. It may be that the backup definition has just got messed up and its looking for different (non-existent) files to increment. If the problem repeats, report back.

You have saved a definition file, haven’t you?

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I’ve been Macrium Reflect for some time now, made only full image backups, never differential or incremental. +1 mngerhold’s idea — with this addendum:
— make new full images of: System Reserved partition [if your Windows has one], OS partition, Data partition
— or if you only have whole drives: C-drive, D-drive full images, just this once with Verify on. — if these new images are ok [meaning a folder or a file can be restored], delete your old backups. Let us know these new backups are ok before you try your incremental backups again.
I want to make one new recommendation: because external media can temporarily “logically” fail or can physically fail, consider dual external HDs, whatever full and incremental images the 1st HD has, the 2nd HD has also.

"Take care of thy backups and thy restores shall take care of thee." Ben Franklin, revisted

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Perhaps one of your incremental backups got corrupted or deleted. They need to all be valid to do another backup. That’s one reason why I use differential rather than incremental. With differential, you only need the base full backup to be valid to do additional backups. I can delete any number of differential backups to conserve space and still be able to do a new differential backup.

When it comes to recovery, if one incremental backup goes bad, that file and all succeeding files cannot be used to recover. With differential, only the bad file can’t be used.

The downside of differential is the individual backup file are larger than incremental, especially as time goes on between new full backups.

Jerry

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Perhaps one of your incremental backups got corrupted or deleted. They need to all be valid to do another backup. That’s one reason why I use differential rather than incremental. With differential, you only need the base full backup to be valid to do additional backups. I can delete any number of differential backups to conserve space and still be able to do a new differential backup.

When it comes to recovery, if one incremental backup goes bad, that file and all succeeding files cannot be used to recover. With differential, only the bad file can’t be used.

The downside of differential is the individual backup file are larger than incremental, especially as time goes on between new full backups.

Jerry

I’ll bet with most people the differential file wouldn’t be that much larger than the incremental, because they probably don’t save a lot of stuff on their hard drive. I know that is the case with me.

This is a very helpful suggestion, Jerry.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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