Can Macrium Reflect Clone/Backup Multiple drives to one Drive?

[Brandon_Byrnes]

I just purchased a 14TB external drive. I would like to clone my OS drive to the external drive, then create backups of the other drives I have in my sytem to that same external drive. Can that be done, and if so do i have to create separate partitions on the external drive for each clone and backup?

[PeterOz]

I just purchased a 14TB external drive. I would like to clone my OS drive to the external drive, then create backups of the other drives I have in my sytem to that same external drive. Can that be done,

Yes

and if so do i have to create separate partitions on the external drive for each clone and backup?

No
@Bruce is the expert let’s see if he agrees
14TB is a lot of data to loose

[Brandon_Byrnes]

Yes

No
@Bruce is the expert let’s see if he agrees
14TB is a lot of data to loose

I’ll be honest I did start the backup and cloning last night. So what I did was I cloned my main C drive to the external drive then I created a partition on the external drive for my D drive which is my file storage drive and I chose the Disk image option and set up the backup frequency to one full backup every month and then an incremental backup everyday. I’m pretty sure that’s what I want since I’m constantly adding and deleting files. It seems to have worked except the only annoying thig now is that when i go to This PC it shows the 3 separate partitions on the external drive as separate drives, and I really don’t need anymore drives showing in This PC since I already had 4 listed before this. I did see that you can hide the drive by going into Disk Management and removing the drive letter but then I’m wondering if that’s going to mess up my incremental backups, like will Macrium still detect the drive if i deleted the drive letter from Disk Management?

[Bruce]

correct - removing the drive letter stops the drive from showing - and also from being used.

I use Macrium to create images (rather than cloning) of my drive and store them all on another drive.
then you just double click the .MRIMG file to have it open as a mounted drive to access any info you want to recover.

when I do clone a drive, any extra capacity on the destination drive just gets left unused and you can’t clone another drive to that unused portion (of course) - so yeah, partitioning a large drive into chunks of the same size as the drive being cloned would work but as you have found, you have all these drive letters and you never know how much space each of these chunks should be (to any accurate degree).

and yeah, as Peter says, 14TB is a lot to lose, so make sure the only stuff on the 14TB unit is also somewhere else, or you don’t care when it goes pear shaped.
cause you know that day will come!

[Brandon_Byrnes]

okay good to know. I’ll probably get another drive in the future so that I have atleast 2 backups. I know the ideal thing is to have a local backup, a cloud backup and a physical off-site backup, that gets pretty expensive though, especially the cloud backup I would imagine.

[Bruce]

yeah, backing up, if done properly, can get expensive to setup, and require a bit of effort to maintain.
but, like any insurance, you never appreciate all that effort until the day it saves your bacon.

[PeterOz]

Cloud backup is not worth it in my own opinion

[Bruce]

@Brandon Byrnes - any updates?

[Brandon_Byrnes]

so far so good. I have everything backed up. One question though, it seems like something, maybe Macrium is really slowing down my system. It seems like every since I installed Macrium, now my apps are taking a lot longer to launch, also it’s taking a lot longer for my pc to start up and shutdown. Have you experienced anything like this from using Macrium? The slowdown is very noticeable compared to how my system was running before I installed Macrium. I initially though it was slowing down becuase Macrium was backing up data but I have it set for incremental backups everyday at midnight and I’m experiencing slowdown at all times of the day.

[Bruce]

Macrium is only started on my PC’s when I want to use it, cloning and imaging.
it never runs in the background.
the StartUp entry gets deleted whenever I install or upgrade it and I check the system tray and task scheduler for any entries as well.

[Brandon_Byrnes]

I just checked and it isn’t in my system tray although it is included in my strtup progams, but Windows says it’s impact is low, atleast on startup times. Since I have it set to incremental updates every night I think i need it to be running in the background unfortunately, but it’s scheduled for one of those backups in a half hour so I think after it completes that backup i’ll end task it in task manager and see if my system runs any better.

[PeterOz]

no problems on my side
it is always running
Ver 7

[Bruce]

@Brandon Byrnes - any updates?

[Brandon_Byrnes]

everything is good now. i figured out that its my external backup thats slowing stuff down so i just disconnect it then reconnect it when it get ready to do the backup.