I did notice something strange. In Macrium, the initial restored Ubuntu partition showed 4.09 GB used out of an 8 GB partition. I resized the 8 GB partition to 100 GB, imaged and restored with Macrium and the 100 GB partition now showed 5.46 GB used. The used space should not have changed so your observation of incorrect data size should be investigated.
Thanks Brian for your further information. Based on the experiences from you and me, I would restrain from using MR as my top pick for imaging EXT4 partitions. It does look like there are issues with MR imaging EXT4 partitions. I would choose IFL/IFW, Paragon and Clonezilla as the tools of choice.
I forgot to mention a Macrium restore took 6 times longer than an IFL restore. IFL is fast. I have a multi-boot test system with Win8, Win10, Win7 and WinXP. An Entire Drive restore to an empty drive takes 68 seconds.
Thanks for sharing this info. It agrees with what I observed also. Other fast imagers include Drive Snapshot and Acronis (when run from a boot media). I dual boot Win10 x64 with Ubuntu x64 on the same OS drive. I imaged the whole OS drive using IFL, paragon HDM and Clonezilla. Acronis was blazing fast when imaging the Win partitions, but crawls when it comes to the Linux partition,even though the data on the Linux partition is only a few GB in size. Not sure why. Drive Snapshot has the same problem when imaging EXT4 drive under UEFI Secure boot system.
It would be great if you could try Drive Snapshot on a Linux drive (OS in UEFI secure boot mode) to see the imaging speed. It appears Drive Snapshot and Acronis both have problems imaging EXT4 on two of my desktop OS computers. It took them ages to complete the imaging even though the Ubuntu OS is only a few GB on disk, and the image files are quite a bit larger than it should be. IFL and Paragon as well as Clonezilla has no such problems.
I'll try it now. Edit.. The DS image speed is crawling. Looks like it's going to be 10 times slower than Macrium.
Thanks again Brian! You results confirmed my previous observations over a long time with DS. I reported this issue to Tom the developer, but it appears he did not pay much attention. May he does not consider it's worthwhile to address issues with EXT4, as majority of users are using WIN. Anyway, Acronis has the same issue. I hope developers from both companies could take a look at this issue. It's a shame because Acronis and DS are really fast imaging WIN partitions.
Very slow imaging. The drive was "cleaned" by Diskpart and the image was restored to the empty drive. The restore speed was about the same as Macrium. Ubuntu booted. Backup imaging speed of DS is 10 times slower than Macrium and 60 times slower than IFL.
So it (DS) works, sort of. I mean, not really for Linux imaging. From your test results, it appears (to me at least) that both DS and MR have issues imaging EXT4 partitions. 60 times and 6 times slower than IFL does not appear right for DS and MR, if we consider the imaging speed of these imagers for Windows. Something weird is going on for sure for DS and Acronis when dealing with EXT4. For Win, I use Acronis and IFL boot media (sometimes Macrium Reflect) for cold imaging; for Ubuntu I think I'll stick with IFL, Clonezilla and Paragon. In all of these, IFL appears to be a all time imager of choice.
Is it fair to compare software utilities like Macrium and DS that only offer basic support for Linux, with a utility like IFL that is primarily designed to work with Linux?
IFL on a UFD is easy to automate. You can create a menu list of Backups/Restores. Boot the UFD, click the item in the menu and it happens.
It's fair. IFL is not designed specifically to image Linux partitions. The name of IFL is a bit misleading but in fact the "Linux" as in "IFL" refers to the boot media type, i.e., IFL boot media is based on Linux, but it can image any file system such as NTFS, EXT4, etc once booted into the boot environment. DS also claims that it supports both NTFS and EXT4. So all comparisons are fair. Also look at the price. IFL is the cheapest, yet could do a lot more with a much better performance.
Raza, depends how you define fair. IFL runs in a Linux environment and isn't more designed to work with Linux than IFW or IFD. The three apps will backup/restore Windows, DOS and Linux systems.. Instead of IFL, I could have used IFW (on a boot disk) to do the above tests. I'll try it now and let you know the results.
You guys are talking about boot disks, but IFL can only install on a Linux system, so it is primarily designed for a Linux system. Both Macrium and DS are primarily designed to install and work on a Windows system and only offer additional support for Linux file systems. So no wonder that IFL outperforms everybody on Linux. Others are probably not optimized for Linux imaging. Macrium for example, does not say that it is designed to backup and restore a Linux system, they only say that Macrium supports Ext 2, 3 and 4 file systems.
Raza, I just did the backup/restore using IFW in a WinPE. The times were almost double the IFL times. With Windows OS images, IFL is faster on my computers, but not quite twice as fast. It varies from computer to computer.
You need to listen to, and try to understand what others are saying. As Brian said, you can use Terabyte Image for Windows instead of IFL to image a EXT4 linux partition just as good as you use IFL. IFL is not designed only for imaging Linux. When Macrium and DS say that they support EXT4/3/2, they clearly mean that they support imaging of Linux installed in these file systems. Macrium even clearly claim that they "Fully support" EXT4/3/2, which means any Linux systems installed using EXT4/3/2 will be fully supported. Brain's test and my observations indicate that that's not entirely true.
Raza, not really. You can install it in a Linux OS partition but you can't backup that partition with IFL. It can only backup and restore unmounted partitions. I don't bother installing it in Ubuntu. I use it from a boot disk to image Ubuntu. I've just demonstrated how IFW outperforms Macrium and Drive Snapshot.
...by a margin of 3 times and 30 times faster. So that's why it appears to me that there is performance issues with DS and MR for imaging EXT4.
But unlike, IFL, Macrium does not state anywhere that they can backup and restore a Linux system or is a utility that is optimized for Linux backup and disaster recovery. This is the difference between IFL and Macrium. What I am trying to say is that Macrium is slower to backup ext partitions because it is not optimized for Linux backups. So if one needs to backup Linux they should look elsewhere.
Raza, in case we didn't explain that IFW, IFD and IFL all create the same images. You can image with one and restore with another.
I have never used IFW, IFD and IFL. Why does the company market the same software under different names, if they all have similar capabilities and are not individually optimized to work on Windows, Dos and Linux respectively?