It is inappropriate when using a remote network sync unless you are not limited by your uplink bandwidth and your offsite storage quota.

This might be appropriate for tape archives or write once media. Use only if you require each backup file to be self-contained. Each backup point is time-consuming to generate and takes a lot of storage. Full onlyĮach file contains the entire backup. They have different characteristics that make each most suitable to different overall backup strategies. Reflect offers several predefined backup templates. This can be considerable for multi-GB image backups. One hybrid option to overcome this is to send the full by post and only transmit the delta (inc/diff) backups via the network (see for a commercial example).Ĭommercial offsite / cloud storage solutions typically carry a storage size per month charge. Also, WAN connections are often asymmetric with the uplink being up to an order of magnitude lower than the download. However, even though a decent uplink bandwidth is available at a much more reasonable cost than a few years ago, it is still usually low enough that transmitting a full image backup can take a significant time. Typically, you will choose to transmit your backup files to offline / cloud storage over a network. We have written in general about this here.

2 local copies on different storage types.

The key to the well regarded 3–2–1 backup strategy is the diversity of backup media and location.

Some thoughts on choosing a backup plan when considering offline storage constraints.

Macrium backup