1. First of all I am aware of your statement that you utilize the Macrium Reflect Free program that you really like and "have no intent on switching".
2. Be that as it may, spend a few moments of your time perusing the following, OK?
3. You indicated you comprehensively back up your approx. 580 GB of data 5x per week. A good thing indeed. However, it takes a little over 2 hrs per session to accomplish that, thus your chief (if not exclusive) concern is with any adverse effects impacting the HDD because of the 10 hrs or so of expended time to accomplish these weekly backups.
4. So now you're considering a different backup regimen involving a "full" backup once a week and then undertaking "differential" backups the remaining four days of the week, right? Sounds plausible.
5. I'd just like to bring to your attention (FWIW) another disk-cloning (not disk-imaging) program (Casper) that might be of interest to you. It's a commercial program that costs $49.99. Now before you recoil in horror (as many potential users do) about paying $49.99 for a type of program that one can obtain freely on the net, e.g., the Macrium program, let me explain why you might consider using this program.
(Before we go any further (and you're still reading this) let me state I am not associated with the Casper program in any commercial way. I point this out because being such a zealot for this program I've often been accused of having some commercial interest with the developer.)
6. I've used many disk-cloning programs over the years (including the Macrium program) and have never found a d-c program the equal of the Casper program in terms of ease of use, general effectiveness, and most of all, speed of d-c operations when the program is utilized on a frequent basis such as the way you utilize a comprehensive backup program.
7. Casper employs a technology which they term "SmartClone". After a disk has been cloned for the first time the technology identifies all of the changed areas on both the source and destination drives and updates only those areas of the destination hard disk necessary to reflect the current state of the source drive. Because there is no need to re-clone data that remains unchanged, SmartClone rapidly determines which differential updates need to be made to the destination hard disk, and then uses this information to safely eliminate the redundant transfer of data during the cloning process. The result is a dramatic reduction in the time required to re-clone an entire disk since only changed data is being cloned to the destination disk.
8. The upshot of all this is that when the user wisely backs up his/her source drive on a routine/frequent basis the Casper program is at its best in terms of disk-cloning speed and enables the user to rapidly update and maintain a complete, fully bootable replacement for a Windows system. So it's especially useful for users like yourself who carry out relatively frequent backup operations.
9. You can schedule backups to be performed daily, weekly, monthly, or at any time desired.
10. There is available a 30-day Trial Version of the Casper program. It's slightly crippled as compared with the commercial version, e.g., partition-to-partition cloning is not supported in the Trial Version, but would give you a reasonable idea as to the program's capabilities. So you may want to give it a shot. You can download it from https://www.fssdev.com/products/casper/trial/
11. If you do give it a "go" keep in mind that the initial disk-cloning operation involving the cloning of some 580 GB of data will take a considerable length of time to complete. The subsequent d-c operations performed rather frequently (approx 5X per week) should proceed substantially more quickly.
12. Anyway...if you do decide try the Casper program over a reasonable period of time please let us know of your impressions.
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