so much for your hard drive space unless you have around 2 or 3+TB to spare just for backup images. Just for reference, I used the default 'Medium Compression' setting for a drive with about 380GB of content and Macrium Reflect created the backup image at a size of 177GB. The amount of space the backups could take up might severely reduce the available space your hard drive for no good reason though.

a bit extreme in my opinion, but it does afford you the ability to go back up to 14 months of scheduled backups.

So from what I've researched and read ( ignoring the 'Rapid Delta Restore' Option, since I haven't used the Pro version - see: ) I would suggest that you keep the default setting of 4 differential backups, created once a week, and maintain at LEAST 3 FULL Backups for you to go back up to 3 months earlier to 'find' what it is that you are hoping to prevent the loss of. You *probably* meant: 'I want to have 3 different backups to reference back to in the event I make a mistake by accidentally overwriting or deleting something', much like we used to have to do in 'the olden days' before Version Control was as prevalent and function as it is today.įrom what I've read up on and gather (as I actually only recently switched to using Macrium Reflect myself), The initial backup of your system is what Macrium uses to reference against your CURRENT state of storage affairs, and in your case (using the Pro version) WITH capabilities of Incremental Backups, you can also build the Differential backups faster. I'm betting this is not what you meant though. If you are looking to be 'triple safe' in maintaining your backups in 3 different locations, in the event as many as 2 hard drives fail at once and you could still have a 3rd copy, then you could schedule 3 different backups to 'target' 3 different drives / network locations. The FULL Backup process is (supposedly) shortened by leveraging the Differential and Incremental Backups as reference points for backing up your system. However, if you are aiming for 3 system snapshots for a specific purpose, we will need more details on your goals.

So to answer your question: Yes, its normal. Yet all 3 checkboxes you have mentioned ARE TICKED by default in, even in the Free version. I've been using the Macrium Reflect Free (Home) version, which does NOT provide for incremental 'snapshots' of drive configurations.

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