Data Hoarder

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We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.

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Macrium is going subscription-only? (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by hobbyhacker@alien.top to c/datahoarder@selfhosted.forum

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Here is the black friday, usually the best time to get Macrium licenses. But this year the sale is really disappointing. https://www.macrium.com/products/home

There is no discount on single license, and only 25% on the 4 machine license. Last year it was 50%. They also introduced a stupid subscription plan, which is discounted to hell to lure people in.

But subscriptions for offline backup is a huge no-no. I won't pay yearly ransom to use my own data on my own drives. It was one of the reasons why I ditched Acronis (and there were other reasons to be honest).

Looks like I have to start the endless search again for a good image backup software.

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[–] tariandeath@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What features do you use Macrium for?

Honestly if you are only dealing with windows, and only looking for imaging, it might be better to just run a dism.exe script like this one: https://github.com/KyodaiKen/DISMBackup on a schedule.

[–] dr100@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

That's probably good for one-off backups but Macrium can do:

incrementals so you don't save again hundreds of GBs for a partition that not much has changed
split files at desired size (as opposed to having only the option for huge archives)
can exclude directories from images which can be EXTREMELY useful

Unfortunately Veeam doesn't do the last two, otherwise it's a nice contender.

[–] hobbyhacker@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

I use endless incremental method with 60 days history. So I always have 60 days to go back with having only one full backup that gets the expired incrementals merged automatically. This way the daily backup only takes a few minutes and it doesn't need too much overhead space to store multiple full images as with other methods. It is also encrypted and uses VSS so it can backup everything on a live system. Sends email if there was a problem, supports pre an posts scrips to mount my backup drive, etc.

I also do independent full backups occasionally of course, but the previous one is the main reason for Macrium. Sometimes I just use it to dump other disks or old SDcards to a compressed image file that I can mount and use easily if needed.