This from Howard Kaplan:

Joe,

I tried twice to post this, but only your original message is showing up under the thread. There may be a Mudcat database problem somewhere.


I've been very happy with Macrium Reflect for backup under Windows. (I'm describing the "pro" version here, which is not free; I can't recall which features aren't in the free version.) It gives the user a choice of full backup, incremental backup (changes since the last backup), and differential backup (changes since the last full backup). It will backup only the changed parts of large files (e.g., databases) where most of the file stays unchanged between backups, provided the unchanged parts are left in the same disk locations. It backs up to special image files, not to native (FAT, NTFS, etc.) files, but it allows the images to be mounted as read-only drives from which any required files can be copied to recover them.

I follow the recommendation to make a full backup about once a month and incremental backups between full backups. That gives a good tradeoff between the time and space required for full backups and the time required to recover files from the incremental backups.