By TonyL - 1 February 2016 4:56 PM
Hi,
I've been using a 30 day incremental plus single full backup for several years using V5 and it works fine for me. I now want to add offline rotating backup as I'm getting paranoid about ransomware seeking out connected media to encrypt. An offline drive would provide a full backup no more than 30 days old in a worst case scenario. While I'm making the changes I may also introduce a Synthetic Full Backup plan. It seems to have no downsides so why not? The 2 USB external drives have been allocated as J: and L: on my system and I have set J: as my alternative destination. All seems well so far and after a trial drive swap Reflect is doing an initial full backup to the alt drive location as I type this.
Questions:
1) I'm new to backup media swapping plans. Does my plan make sense? Anything I've overlooked?
2) I intend to manually swap drives at approximately 30 day intervals. After a swap Reflect is obviously going to 'see' an older backup set. Actually, the drive swap could happen at any time...as/when I remember to do it. My understanding is that Reflect will simply add an increment as required to make the set current on the newly swapped in media....is that right?
Thanks.
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By Gork - 2 February 2016 9:46 AM
Your plan seems sound to me for now. (Once Reflect *v6* switches to keeping track of changes to the backed up media "on the fly" I would think this might become problematic, but Macrium has indicated it will be an option to enact this feature.)
One idea which you may or may not find easier... I wouldn't use the "alternate destination" option in Reflect and would run a simple backup plan to a single "on site" external drive. I'd attach the "off site" external drive to the computer every so often and manually copy any new image file chains from the "on site" drive over to it. Then depending on how many chains I wanted to keep on the off site drive I'd just manually delete whatever data from it I wanted to and disconnect it again.
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By Drac144 - 2 February 2016 8:38 PM
I do something very similar to what Gork describes. However, that does involve some manual effort and not everyone wants to do things manually if there is an automated way. I like the "control" of doing it myself and insuring all is well. But that is me. Of course doing things manually minimizes the time the external drive is online and exposed to "issues" from the outside world.
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By TonyL - 6 February 2016 2:17 PM
Thanks both,
I shall go with my original 'alt-dest' plan for at least one drive swap cycle to see how it goes with the current V6 version but I'll keep in mind Gork's 'copy chains to offsite' suggestion if I run into problems.
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