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- Overview
Overview
Windows operating systems and applications will frequently change "under the hood" without it being obvious to users. These changes will be included in a differential or incremental image and may cause the backups to be larger than expected. This article describes a feature in Macrium Reflect to log the changed files that have been included in a differential or incremental image.
This may increase the time taken to create a backup and should only be used for diagnosis and troubleshooting.
How to Log File Changes
To log the changed files that have been included in a differential or incremental image, set the following registry key. Reflect will then perform a reverse look-up to identify the files for each cluster that is backed up.
| Key: | HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Macrium\Reflect\Settings |
| Name: | LogIncrementalChanges |
| Type: | DWORD |
| Value: | 1 |
Once the registry key has been created, it should look like the example below:
Next, create an incremental or differential image, then navigate to 'C:\ProgramData\Macrium\Reflect' in Windows Explorer.
In addition to the normal '.html' and '.vsslog' files, a '.inc.log' file will also be created for each NTFS partition in the differential or incremental:
The first file, {IMAGEID}-XX-YY.inc.log, is the log for the first NTFS partition; the next file would be {IMAGEID}-XX-YY1.inc.log, and so on.
Opening one of these log files will display all the changed files that were included in the incremental or differential image:
Following this, it is recommended that the registry key be removed to prevent it having a negative impact on performance.