Restoring with Macrium Reflect

I use Macrium Reflect Free 5.1 to occasionally make a full disk backup, for the first time, I have now used it to restore the backup. I used the WinPE bootable USB drive and it took almost 4 hours, though the compression of the backup was set to high. The image file was about 200 gigs so that means the restore speed was approximately 14MB/s(from an external hard drive connected via USB2.0, when moving files to that drive I get about 30MB/s so it isn't the bottleneck.) How are your experiences with this?

The restore was succesfull(didn't use the verify image option because I canceled it as it seemed it would take some hours as well.) When I booted in my restored windows again, the boot process was quite slow, with the HDD activity light permanently on for about 5 minutes, 2nd boot as well, though a little shorter, 3rd boot seemed more normal again. In the backup option I saw that by default it doesn't include the hibernate and pagefile to save space, so I guess the slow boots were related to the lack of the pagefile. Other than the long time it took to restore, Reflect Free seems like a solid and reliable way to backup and restore disk images.
EDIT: Did a CHKDSK afterward, came up clean

 

I was having that long restore time too compared to other products. Then i tried the Linux boot cd and restore went back to normal speeds. Backup and Restore is the same time now from hdd to hdd that is.

 

The higher the compression, the longer to restore.

 

Yes, but the backing up with high compression takes 2-3 hours on average, so still shorter than restoring.

Thanks, I'll try the linux one next time.

 

why wont the free version see my external HDD at restore.?

 

Ha! Good question! When i installed v5, the Linux CD couldn't see the HDD where i keep the backups (i have 1 SSD and 2 HDDs). On the contrary, v4's Linux CD could see it correctly. So i kept using v4. Until recently when for the first time in years, i had a failed restore, due to corrupted image file, so now i m giving a chance to Paragon free, which by the way needs no CD to restore and allows differential backups (although i think it's slower than Macrium).

 

hi fuzzfas,
Paragon free is the one im considering using.Any problems with this one seeing your external HDD at restore.?
Is it the linux environment it restores with.?
Thanks.

 

I don't know about external HDD, but it detects my 3 internal drives correctly. Paragon has a built-in restore console, which loads before boot without you needing to use CD, but it also allows you to make a Linux CD as safety-valve i guess.

If you use the restore console, you don't need to do anything. You choose the image you want to restore from WITHIN Windows. You hit "apply" and it reboots and restores the image you had chosen automatically, you need to do nothing manually. So, i guess, as long as it sees your external disk inside Windows, it will have no problem... But you must try for yourself to be sure.

 

I usually use the boot cd but the built in console sounds an interesting idea.
Thank you for your advice.

 

Yes, me too, with Macrium free, i HAD to use the CD. But with Paragon, as long as the restore console sees your external disk, there's no reason to use the CD and it's much more convenient. Personally i have burnt a Linux Paragon CD, but i keep it only as emergency tool, in case the restore through the console for some reason fails or hangs at half way and Windows is bust. Then i will use the Linux CD to attempt again the restore.