Macrium Reflect or Shadow Protect Win 8

If you want to do files and folder backups only, you can simply use sync software such as FreeFileSync which is free

 

Very quick, easy to use, and worth a Donation to the author to say 'Thanks'.

J

 

Yes, but a software like macrium compresses the folders into a single archive, which is easier to handle and is significantly smaller in size. You can also encrypt the archive if needed. A must have feature in an imaging software.

I have however bookmarked freefilesync and will try it when I have free time.

 

Hello Aladdin,

It's six times better.

Ok, all joking aside I'm looking into the Macrium Reflect product. They offer a number of similar features to StorageCraft ShadowProtect, for example:

Disk Imaging
Disk Cloning
Access images in Windows Explorer
Schedule backups
Rescue Media (RAID support)
Windows XP/Vista/7/8 compatible
Support for GPT

All of these are straight off of the Macrium Reflect feature comparison. I've also heard that Macrium doesn't run anything on the target system until a backup occurs. This implies an agent-less backup (the snapshot code is inserted into the stack at the time the backup starts) rather than an agent-based backup. I also understand that Macrium Reflect does not provide customer support for their free product (again off their website). Finally, I'm curious about how the backup actually occurs which would have a bearing on the overall integrity of the backup.

I can tell you that StorageCraft is a Microsoft Gold Application Developer and that we follow Microsoft's established practices for VSS snapshots (e.g. running the backup as an agent loaded in the OS at runtime). This ensures application stability and a quality snapshot backup as the vss writers correctly settle transactions before the snapshot and resume afterwards. What this means to you is that if you have critical systems/data and you want reliable backups and guaranteed support then your choice should be clear.

No, I don't get paid 6 times more than Macrium employees... and no, I'm not greedy. You'll see from my posts that I'm a normal person who has a great job helping other technical computer people. I find this very satisfying. If there is a request for technical information and I can help then I'll join the conversation. And even if we don't always agree I'm still grateful for the intelligent conversations and thoughtful people I've met since I've joined this forum.

Thank you!

 

Thanks, guys. I've heard this same conversation in another thread and was able to bring this up in my weekly meeting with the Product Managers yesterday. I would also like to see a more convenient solution for product activation that works for everyone. I appreciate you having the courage to share your comments about the activation process.

Cheers!

 

Some more great *free* ways to backup might include:

Backup Maker (Personal Edition): an intuitive program with a good set of features.

Genie Timeline (Free Edition): runs as a standalone program, can schedule.

Toucan: a utility that synchronizes and backs up data.

FBackup: another easy-to-use standalone.

And my favorite for storing files/folders on an external system has been Robocopy. I can script this .exe to do just about anything I want it to.

Just some more options.

Cheers!

 

Hi Steven,

Could you point me to any piece of information that explains why "running the backup as an agent" is better than Macriums approach? I worked a lot with VSS, and I fail to see any difference. Thank you

Isso

 

Can StorageCraf retore image to smaller partition?

 

Hey Isso,

You caught me just as I was heading out the door. I'll hang around for a few more minutes to offer a quick reply because I think this is an interesting topic. There are strong feelings in both camps on what the best backup solution is, so I'm going to make an effort to provide you with information so you can decide for yourself.

First, let me offer my opinion. Some people prefer the convenience agent-less backups offer because you don't have to restart an operating system (aka production server) when setting up a backup. This would seem like a big plus in my mind. With an agent-based backup you will need to reboot a system after an install because the snapshot driver resides at the operating system kernel level and hence requires the OS to be restarted.

Agent-less backups actually use a technique called Dispatch Table Hooking which injects code into a running Windows OS system without requiring a reboot. This technique is sometimes employed by malware and has been explicitly discouraged by Microsoft's kernel engineers as it can easily cause instability in the system resulting in system crashes and unrecoverable data corruption (good reference here).

Agent-less backups typically traverse the file system to determine changes for incremental/differential backups. This traversal can take longer and be more complex than the agent-based backup which has access to Change Block Tracking (CBT) at the kernel level. Agent-based backups will rely more heavily on local resources to pre-process and compress data before transmitting it to the storage device (NAS/SAN, local USB drive, or remote host). Agent-less backups will rely more heavily on network resources as they transmit application commands as well as data over the network.

Here are some more references:

Dell AppAssure published the "5 Misperceptions of Agentless VMware Backup"
Asigra (a competitor of StorageCraft) published "Agentless Backup is Not a Myth"
StorageCraft published "Agent vs. Agentless Backup"
Kate at Symantec published "Agent and Agentless VM Backup and Recovery" which describes why you want to consider using agentless backups for VMs.
Greg Shields (Microsoft MVP) advocates agents in his paper, "VMware and Hyper-V Backups Agents vs Agentless Approach"
MSP industry leader Kaseya discusses "Agent vs Agentless System Management"

Yes, I should admit that some of these references intimate that backups should be done at the VM host level using a backup agent. I don't know how many of you are actively using hypervisors every day, so this may not match the "home use" model. Still, VM use does parallel to some degree what home users experience as a VM client is basically an application just like other system-intensive applications a home user might run on their system.

I also want to note that Greg Shields's article proposes agent-based backups when he was previously employed by Concentrated Technology and Dell. Greg is now employed by Veeam which offers VMWare backup software which is agent-less, and I have to wonder if he would still argue for agent-based backups.

I'm trying to be open and honest here to point out these disparities because there are strong arguments for either side. In my opinion, the single most powerful reason for running an agent-based system is that Microsoft seems to indicate that this is the way they intended the operating system to allow backups. Their own backup software is an agent-based backup system. And they authored the code for this system which makes their opinion worth a lot. On the other hand, they don't prohibit agent-less backups and there are many good products out there that use them.

Personally, I think a well-informed decision is the best type of decision. So if I've helped to clear the waters (or muddy them?) at least you're thinking and examining the options. Thank you for the good question.

Cheers!

 

Dear Steve,

What difference does it make if it is agent less or not. The proof of the pie is in the pudding. Macrium Reflect has always been very reliable and no one has complained about its reliability.

Acronis is one of the best product out there, like Macrium. It runs as agent loaded and it is very reliable too. All three imaging programs, ShadowProtect, Macrium Reflect and Acronis True Image Home almost do the same functions, and all do it excellent. All three have great imaging, restoring, incremental and differential backup and do it excellent.

But in your mumbo jumbo you failed to address, why your product is six times expensive than both Acronis and Macrium?

Best regards,

Mohamed

 

Hi Steve,

Dearest Isso is a software developer who has is own company. He has a product out there in Alpha format, which is Hybrid Imaging/Snapshot Software. It would be in Beta shortly. It is priced excellent without the crappy activation of StorageCraft.

Talking about not trusting your own customers and biting the hands that feed you and equating all your customers like thieves.

It reminds me of a company called, Lotus 123. At that time I was working in USA. VisiCalc was about a year old and was a hit along with Apple. But when the genuine IBM PC came out, along with it came the Lotus 123. It became the dream of all CPAs. We CPAs finally found a program, where we can do consolidation accounting of all the groups of big companies. Dream World.

We pirated the Lotus 123, and took it to our companies and showed our big bosses. Tons of companies bought IBM PC so that they can run Lotus 123. Both IBM PC and Lotus 123 sales skyrocketed. Mitch Kapoor, became a millionaire overnight. Then the decision came to go against the same customers. Companies started ditching Lotus 123 and Microsoft Excel filled the gap. Mitch sold Lotus 123 in good times and IBM was left holding the bags of Lotus 123.

I don't know if you will understand what I have written above or not. StorageCraft is on the dead bed. Yes, it has corporation to sell to, who then pass on the cost to us consumers. Too big to fail, the founding fathers were against that. But, who remembers today.

Best regards,

 

Dear Steve,

It would be nice if StorageCraft provided a free product like Macrium Reflect. Don't mind if they don't provide support for it. It seems they are too cheap to do that.

Another thing Macrium does that one cannot join their forum, if they have not purchased their product. It keeps the trolls away.

Each company has its own policies and procedures.

Best regards,

 

I do so love reading your commentary and agree with a lot of what you say but on this point we completely disagree.

While ATI (Acronis True Image) has a GREAT set of features and is priced reasonably their implementation is a mess. Way too many bugs and issues introduced in the past three or so years to make it a viable solution. And their now common practice of deleting threads in their forums which point out problems in their software only makes it worse.

I left Ghost for ATI when Norton didn't update their software for way too long. I also didn't like Symantec in general due to issues with other software and Ghost was constantly erroring out during the beginning of scheduled backups. (I think I've finally figured out, with no help from Symantec, that this was caused by their feature to allow you to leave out user specified files and folders during an imaging process.) ATI looked (and still does) GREAT on paper. And though in the end I learned to work around most of the bugs in the ATI software (including the famous BSOD issue upon uninstalling their software which plagued many), I didn't want to support a company which felt comfortable releasing such a garbage-laden product.

But, one thing I CAN thank Acronis for is angering me to the point I did a LOT of research over about a year before deciding on Macrium Reflect (because I didn't want to end up with more Acronis type garbage,) and I'm happier with Reflect than I've been with most of the software I use on a daily basis. The only other imaging software I've been this happy with was PowerQuest's Drive Image, before Symantec bought the company and ruined Drive Image by incorporating it into its own line of imaging software. I have to admit, their latest version of SSR (Symantec System Recovery) teases me a little, but why look further? I'm completely happy with Reflect, even sans the few features I'd like to see added.

StorageCraft's ShadowProtect was in my top three, and I LOVE the way they look on paper, especially the control the user has over what happens in the background. But as I've indicated before there were three main reasons I didn't go with them (and several more insignificant). In order of importance.

First, the agent backup system they use. Though some might consider it better, I didn't want a process running in the background. I also didn't want to deal with the hassle this causes when using sector-by-sector to image "unsupported" file systems.

Second, I wasn't happy with the lack of support for file systems outside of MS file systems. I wanted native support for Linux file systems. (I'd LIKE to have support for Apple's file system too.)

Third, the price.

And actually, there's a fourth. Though I've never experienced it firsthand, I read a LOT about the mess their copy protection scheme makes of things. I did NOT want to deal with that!

None of this is new to anyone who has read some of my previous posts in other threads, but I figured it might be worth repeating here.

 

I've used both Macrium and Shadow Protect on Windows 8 and in the end went Macrium.
I had a few issues in the upgrade from Win 7 (took me a while to decide whether to keep Win 8 at all) so I did one or two restorations and testing both programs. I hit the infamous Shadow Protect activation problems but in their defence they did sort this out for me. No such problems with Macrium.

In comparing the two my experience is as follows:

I have around 90GB on my SSD C drive. Shadow Protect did a full backup in around 22mins, Macrium takes around 28mins. An incremental took around 30 seconds on SP and around 2 minutes on Macrium. However I did get several SP incrementals that took around one hour as Diffgen was used. Macrium incrementals were always around the same speed. SP seems to complain about 'dirty shutdowns' even though the shutdowns seemed fine to me.

Another advantage I found with Macrium is being able to set up more than one job for the same drive. For example I can schedule a C: drive backup to an external hard disk that does full weekly and daily incrementals. I can also set up another C: drive job that does monthly full backups to a NAS and weekly differentials. SP doesn't seem to like two jobs for thew same partition due to the way it tracks changes.

In summary SP is fast but seemed to neeed 'looking after' whereas Macrium is just there doing its job without any hassle and is almost as fast.

The price is also another factor.

 

I noticed that too when I trialed SP. It would complain about a dirty shutdown and the next incremental would take even longer than it takes to run a full image on that partition. The issue gets worse if your incrementals are far apart, for example, I used to run one incremental per day, so there was a gap of 24 hrs between two incrementals and I would see Diffgen used almost 2 -3 times a week, with an incremantal time of over 30 minutes.

 

Question was that if you had to choose between Shadowtportect and Macrium, why would you pick SP over Macrium? What is so special in SP that a person should pay an outrageous up front price and tolerate the activation problems etc.

 

Actually, SP has four processes continuously running in the background.

 

What do they all do? I guess Reflect does have one, but it's only used to "mount" an image so unless you need that capability the service could be inactivated.

 

That is a good question. Perhaps Steve can answer that for us.

The thing is that with Macrium, you can always set the background service to not start automatically, but with SP you cannot do this as SP will fail. They have to start automatically with Windows.

 

Gorkster,

As I only do cold image with Acronis, it's not bad. I only use its linux bootdisk and WinPE. I have never installed it in my real OS.

In my memory, Shadow Protect cannot restore image to smaller partition. It is inconvenient for people who want to restore image to SSD or smaller partition.
How about Shadow Protect v5? Can it do this now?

 

Very smart indeed!

 

I do not like imaging software that has background processes or services running on real OS.

Acronis' install version is quite bloated. That's why I do not install it.

If I want to do hot imaging I will choose Active@ DiskImage Lite which is also free of charge.
It does not have background processes or services. Also, it can run as a portable software.

 

Maybe Steve can answer that, however, when I had to do that, I ran the "Shrink" in W7 to reduce the partition size of the HDD to that of the SSD. I did have to run the "Shrink" several times because W7 wouldn't let me shrink the entire amount in one pass.
I agree, that was inconvenient. But it worked!

 

JW Clements,

I know what you mean, but it is really inconvenient.
If there has imaging software that can meet your requirements, why don't use the more flexible one?

 

I agree... file/folder backups can be as simple as an automated copy application. Robocopy also works very well for this purpose.

ShadowProtect is an image-based backup which means that if you have a 200k MS Word document and you edit one sentence that changes the document then an image-based incremental will only copy the bytes/sectors that have changed. On the other hand a file/folder backup will copy the entire 200k file because the whole file has changed. Due to this scenario you may have smaller incremental backups.

ShadowProtect DOES provide file/folder recovery. It's as easy as mounting your recovery point as an NTFS volume and dragging and dropping the files/folders back to your drive.

Personally I think an image-based solution offers better storage functionality with all of the ease of file/folder recovery. Add to this the fact that business systems often include domain users and ACL file permissions that are not usually preserved by file/folder backups and an image-based backup solution becomes even more attractive.

Cheers!