Good afternoon all,
Currently I have (2) backup schedules setup (v7 Home 4-pack) :
C (SSD) to D (platter)  12pm - FULL on SU, DIFF on M-SA - keep 1 FULL and 6 DIFFs
C (SSD) to E (platter) 6pm - FULL on SU, DIFF on M-SA - keep 1 FULL and 6 DIFFs
This has been working out fantastic for me. I also have a few manual backup sets that I run in between. The 2 listed above are the only ones in Task Scheduler.

I was thinking about adding INCs to the mix in the same backup schedule. If I add INCs and add the same schedule as the DIFF (12pm and 6pm), what would happen :
A - would the DIFF run first and then the INC ?
B - would both try to run at the same time ?
C - would the INC fail to run because the DIFF was scheduled first ?
or should I setup the INCs to run completely different times, e.g. 3pm and 9pm ?

In the backup folder when these were done I would like the weekly FULL + 6 daily DIFFs + 6 daily INCs.

If you have different backups scheduled to run at the same time, only 1 backup will run.  A full takes precedence over differentials and incrementals and a differential takes precedence over incrementals.

See this:  https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/know72/macrium-reflect-v7-2-user-guide/scheduling-and-retention-rules/scheduling-backups

If multiple backup types are scheduled to run at the same time within the same definition file, then only the "highest order" backup will run.  The other(s) would be ignored.  So an Incremental would be overridden by a Differential, and both would be overridden by a Full.

For example, consider this schedule:

• Full on the first Sunday of the month at 3 AM
  
• Differential on all Sundays at 3 AM
  
• Incremental every day at 3 AM
  

In this setup, the result would be that Incrementals would run on every day except Sunday.  On Sundays, they would in most cases be overridden by the weekly Differential -- except on the first Sunday of each month, where both the Incremental and Differential schedule would be overridden by the Full.  This design makes it easy to configure a schedule to achieve this kind of result without having to configure exceptions to the Incremental and Differential schedules or else ending up with "redundant" additional backups.

Great information ! Thank you both for taking time to reply and for the links and details.

What were you hoping to achieve (i.e., what benefit are you gaining) by adding in Incrementals on the same schedule as the Differentials?

As explained in the responses from capair and JP, if you put them on exactly the same schedule, then the Incrementals will never run.  If you offset the schedules slightly, then the incrementals will run, but the information they contain will be redundant with what is already backed up in the immediately preceding differential.  Redundancy is sometimes useful as insurance against corruption or drive failure, but you're already achieving this with your drive rotation. You gain no added insurance against catastrophic failure of your destination drives by making additional redundant backups on the same drive, and your added insurance against bit rot is minimal, unless you also create a duplicate copy of the parent full.

Knowing what your goals are would be helpful as far as offering concrete advice.

                                

^ That's a good point.  You're already making weekly Fulls and daily Differentials.  So are you thinking about using the new "intra-daily Incrementals" feature introduced in Reflect V8?

Hi all,
I am extremely happy with the current setup and have tested it several times during full recovery tests (full system recovers in 1 minute 27 - awesome !). I don't really need to tinker with it; however, I thought since my backups run really quick, it wouldn't hurt to have another backup file type in the event that one of my others was corrupted. If the FULL is good and for some dreaded reason the DIFF I needed was corrupt, I could use the INC (or use the data from the other drive). I like the offset time option and if I added it, sounds like it would work.

All of actual work is stored in folders under C:\Data. Any changes in those folders are immediately backed up and mirrored to the D, E and NAS using SyncBackPro. This way I have the extra copies (backup w/revisions and mirrored for easy rollback) and I rely on Macrium mainly for whole system recovery.

I'm also staying on v7 for now so I can't use the new v8 INC feature.

If you have a corrupt Differential, then any Incrementals created as children of that Differential would also be useless.  It is possible to have Incrementals as direct children of a Full, but that would only occur if you didn't have any Differentials already in the set. You would not be able to have two "parallel" chains within your set where you had Differentials as children of Fulls and then a chain of Incrementals also as direct children of the Full.  So I don't think adding Incrementals is going to achieve anything you actually want at the moment.  I would therefore recommend that you just keep what you have now.  Differentials offer more protection against corruption than Incrementals since restoring a backup only requires you to have that Differential and the parent Full.  The only better option to avoid the impact of corruption would be to make 100% Full backups, but that would of course require more space.  And if you've also got other backup solutions in place, then that's probably not necessary.  So again, I would stick with the configuration you already have.  Good think @JK asked!

Thank you again for the detailed explanation. It is a lot more clear now than before about how the sets works and how everything is tied together. As suggested, I will leave my setup as-is because it is working and has been verified with some real-world recoveries.

I agree that OP should probably stick with their current backup plan, which seems to work for them.  However, I do have to disagree with the following statement:


Even Macrium has noted that this is a misconception, and that there is no increased vulnerability associated with incrementals (as opposed to differentials), other than the risk of an accidental deletion of an incremental through user error.

Conversely, incrementals offer benefits in terms of both backup speed and storage space.  Thus, my personal opinion is that the most frequent backup type should almost always be the incremental.