Replacing a video clip drive question

[IAmATeaf]

When I swapped out my drive BI also didn’t know the difference.

I have used Macrium Reflect to image an entire disk in the past but had problems when restoring as the image was from a smaller drive and I was restoring to a larger drive.

Have to be honest using Macrium didn’t even occur to me, maybe next time.

[YrbkMgr]

When I swapped out my drive BI also didn’t know the difference.

No doubt, I mean, that works for sure. I've used robocopy a lot - I'm a little mental about moving stuff around on my system - I have four 8TB external USB HDD's, two 4TB of the same, and two 4TB internal WD Black... so I use MR a lot. In my experience, robocopy (or any other command line operation) requires careful attention - it's rife with opportunities for disaster.

I have used Macrium Reflect to image an entire disk in the past but had problems when restoring as the image was from a smaller drive and I was restoring to a larger drive.

That strikes me as odd - the whole purpose is data migration. In 2019 my system had a 1TB drive with the OS and the first thing I did was image the drive and restored it onto a new 4 TB. But Macrium Reflect is a mission critical application for me - more than BI, so getting my arms around it was a priority. That's how I learned of the excellent forum support.

Have to be honest using Macrium didn’t even occur to me, maybe next time.

FWIW, I make daily incremental backups (Incrementals Forever) at 5 AM, and retain 15 days - then every 15 days a full backup, retaining 4 backups (2 months). I also use the File and Folder Backup to image my BI folders (C:\Blue Iris\*.*) every night at 11 pm. So if I have database corruption or somehow screw the pooch, I can restore everything up to 11 pm the night before. Really saved my skin when I tried to free up disk space by deleting BI files without knowing what I was doing - experience is something you get right after you need it.

Using this strategy, I can restore or roll back with minimal data loss in the event of disaster. Since it's automated, it's easy.

I'm just sharing my positive experience with my strategy, not challenging yours.