Would you recommend Macrium Reflect v6?

To each his own. I have been using ATI and IFL as my imaging apps of choice for a long time, but only use their boot media. The real strength of ATI is speed and compression, because it can utilize the full power of your CPU (up to 8 CPU Cores), on top of reliability. You'll feel its speed backing up/restoring if you are using a 8-Core i7 or even a 4 core i5 processor. Maciurm used to only utilize 2-3 CPU cores. Not sure about Macrium V6 though. ATI used to produce corrupted images at a certain period of time in the past, but that appears to be the remote past now. For me it never failed me over about a decade.

IFL, although extremely reliable, is a bit slow and the compression is less impressive, compared to ATI. I normally make disk images using both apps, just in case any one of them get corrupted and non-recoverable. In reality either one works without any problems.

 

I tend to recommend Macrium first. And I use ATI boot disc more than the live application.

In the end it's what gets the job done.

 

But thats the key phrase isn't it, "but only use their boot media". When the OS is off, everything is in a consistent state. All a backup software has to do it to copy sector data, compress it in a file and save it. Restoring is just copying everything back. The tricky part is how to do a reliable backup when the OS is running and the disk and RAM/Pagefile is being read/written to in the background. This is where ATI was failing. In the year 2007-2008, when I last used ATI, the forums were full of user complaints that ATI would fail to restore 50% of the time when the backup job was done from inside a running Windows. My own tests (2 restores from live backups and 2 fails) resulted in 100% failure rate. That is an unacceptable failure rate. I switched to Paragon and then to Macrium and found both of them to be 100% reliable while restoring a live backup.

To be fair I have not used ATI since 2008, so I do not know if they ever managed to get their act together. But since I tend to stick and recommend the softwares that have never let me down. It will take something special to turn me away from using and recommending Macrium.

My 2 cents to the discussion.

 

When it comes to a mission critical system this is the only way to work. No ambiguities. No tricks. No chances for surprises.

 

I had a strange issue once which made me stay clear from Acronis : I had a crash on my laptop but was able to restore it with Acronis TI version 10 I think, the full system. Two months later, after normal operation, it crashed and I launched a chkdsk /f at boot time. The system partition went corrupt after that. I restored again the disk, everything was fine until I tried chkdsk /f at boot time. I finally came to the conclusion that the metadata of the system partition were corrupt, not the files themselves. I purchased Casper, the only tool that was able to hot-image a disk in file mode, I copied back the destination in sector mode, et voilà, system restored. I never had such issues with Macrium but this story means it can take a long time before you spot something strange after a restoration.

 

MerleOne... one of the classic things that causes what you describe is the imager not caring much about the file structure that it's imaging. Many imagers were like that (and may still be). Today's Macrium, for instance, does a file structure check before it even begins to image what it's being tasked to do... it's like a midi-ChkDsk. These kinds of quick checks prior to imaging, while adding a small amount of time at the beginning of the operation, really help reduce problems associated with restorations.

But like many others, I've never had a false restoration with IFW (many hundreds of HOT images) and of recent, Macrium v6 which has accounted for appx. 120+ successful restorations of HOT images using both Rapid Data Restore (DELTA restoration) and an occasional FULL restore.

I also loved ATI in the v9 days but finally abandoned it along the way due to what others have so eloquently described... I haven't re-looked at it in a long while.

 

@TheRollbackFrog : thanks, I don't really know what happened then but I see no other tool that can corrupt metadata.

Regarding RDR, is it usable from the recovery media ? I have done many images of my laptop with Macrium V6 but no restore yet. I had a major issue a few months ago, before using MV6, and only AOMEI Backupper 2.x was able to restore my PC (at least almost perfectly). Some things are still broken, like the possibility to create a Win 8.1 recovery media, Windows says some files are missing, but apart from that all is working nicely. I also trialling a product similar to Time Machine V2, sort of, ActiveImageProtector Desktop 3.5 SP6, that performs very fast incrementals thanks to a sector modification tracking driver. Previous versions had issues but the current one seems ok, it's published by NetJapan. Hope I am not too off-topic...

 

Yes, and just as fast (for "locked" LIVE volumes) as doing it under LIVE Windows.

That's a no-no You really need to restore both from under LIVE Windows and from the Recovery Media... just to know it works the way you expect it to. If you have another tried and true imager, use that to back up your Macrium attempts.

Thanks for that info... I might just take a quick look at that.

 

Just semi-tried it myself - incrementals on my system were somewhere between AX64 v1 and Macrium v6 in speed.

Didn't try a restore as it didn't appear to have an RDR equivalent.

 

No RDR AFAIK, but I did once a successful restore with version 3.1 a while back, it was fast. Oh BTW, it has a powerful compression feature called "deduplication" which seems really efficient, it slows down a bit the imaging but on a fast PC I guess it is OK.