Delta Restore

[Jedsted]

Yes, both restore only the changed blocks on the disk, where they differ may be in the way they look for changed blocks on disk.

Macrium Reflect can either look for changed blocks at restore time, or keep track of then as it goes.  The latter speeds up time to do a restore, but it does use a slight bit of resources keeping track of changed blocks.

Yes, you're right that the Changed Block Tracking (CBT) technique takes up some resources because it tracks storage blocks that change over time, just because computers nowadays are fast enough that we don't feel its effects.

I prefer not to track changes to CBT, mainly because it was a bit flakey in early days and nowadays it only takes seconds to check changed blocks anyway unless still using spinners.

Tracking CBT changes was really design for corporations, not domestic consumers.

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "domestic consumers."  The largest benefit of CBT is for anyone who frequently updates large files, and in most cases that's defined as DataBase users (large PST-based OUTLOOK users as well).  If that's what you mean by non-"domestic consumers"... so be it.

Frequent random changes to very large DataBases normally would generate very large CLUSTER changes within a Windows FileSystem.  That, in turn, would generate fairly large Incremental change images, depending on the snapshot interval.  CBT reduces those frequent cluster changes to frequent BLOCK changes, allowing the Incremental change images to be quite small... further allowing them to be taken much more frequently without sizable resources being required for storage.

...and as you mentioned, early design bugs were felt by users, but fixed quickly by the Developers.  The option has been quite stable as of late.  For Home/General users, Changed Block auditing is not really a requirement for managing System backup and integrity... that's why Hasleo Backup Suite is more than adequate for that type of user... and quite feature rich at this point in its development.

I just meant home/general users i.e. not domain based users for example.