Macrium Reflect

Discussion in 'backup, imaging & disk mgmt' started by Stigg, Nov 23, 2013.

  1. Peter2150

    Peter2150 Global Moderator

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    I certainly would not, not recommend using the Rapid Delta Restore. I use it all the time. If I want to test a new program or try out a windows update, first I take a Macrium Incremental. Time usually 45 seconds. If I find I immediately don't like what I am seeing, I just do a restore and it's gone. Now on this system full restores take right at 20 minutes. But this Macrium RDR restore usually takes about 45 seconds. In fact it helps me evaluate new imaging program restores. How you ask. Well the Macrium RDR restore only replaces sectors that have changed so what I do is image with new program, and then image with Macrium. Then I'll test restore with the new program and if the boot is normal I will go right into the boot menu option and do the Macrium restore which should be an RDR restore. It should be real fast 30-45 seconds. If it takes much longer it tells me that there were more sectors that needed to be replaced and that makes me wonder about the other program restores.
     
  2. EASTER

    EASTER Registered Member

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    Thank You @Peter2150 for such brief but clear detail of the purpose for RDR and what makes it such a valuable addition to the makeup of feature-rich Macrium Reflect overall.

    When you speak of results in terms of seconds for rapid return of previous functionality (minus tested files/programs) that wraps it up quite nicely.

    By the way you seem to have that particular evaluation procedure (courtesy MR incremental-RDR) set in there on your system like a new pair of gloves. Easy to handle.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2019
  3. CloneRanger

    CloneRanger Registered Member

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    Brilliant !

    I've just bought v7 Reflect recently. & now it seems it has issues !

    What are the main things i need to be aware of, bearing in mind that i haven't done any backups yet.
     
  4. n8chavez

    n8chavez Registered Member

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    For starters, what issues are you having? If it's a VSS issue try repairing it.
     
  5. EASTER

    EASTER Registered Member

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    Macrium Reflect completes another finished (Full) Image Restore to a formatted disk on a 1Tb HDD. It was as simple as deleting the previous partition, issue a double NTFS format as opposed to full zero wipe (as I earlier wrongly mentioned-was not a wipe but a clear out routine-my bad on that).
    As expected everything dropped right into place upon first boot up. 3 years now? Not sure but close enough i'm sure, Macrium is batting 1000 on FULL IMAGE RESTORES on this end.
    I used a modified USB Thumb boot medium-the only BIOS setting I changed when this began was Secure Boot since it shields the Flash from initializing and also raised the Boot Order Level up to assign it first order for the thumb drive. With Macrium v7 already on the Thumb Drive the next step was plug in the miniature external drive where the Image resided then selected from (Browse for an Image) and select the HDD to Restore to.

    Of course this same procedure is a common routine with many different commercial grade Imagers of dependable quality by users.

    If time permits the RDR feature might be worth fitting into my own setups since it appears another huge time saver and restore results are discussed as near instantaneous with incremental's if you consider seconds under a minute or so such. Thanks again @Peter2150 for the tip and sharing your own local experience/results about that feature.

    System is every bit as snappy as a new install. 1Tb is not a short piece of real estate in the digital world these days so was not deterred by the time necessary for it to complete-given there are literally hundreds of old classic videos which are always included as a side order when doing my own systems over again.
     
    Last edited: Apr 7, 2019
  6. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Ok, I didn’t think about cases where people might be capturing Incrementals every 15 minutes. And I have no argument about the boon of RDR, but there’s no indication that CBT makes restores faster. In fact there’s evidence to the contrary because CBT is a Windows driver that isn’t loaded in the Rescue environment.

    As for V6 CBT, is it actually known that it isn’t affected by any of the bugs that have been fixed in V7 CBT? That seems unlikely, even if it’s been performing properly in your particular use case.
     
  7. n8chavez

    n8chavez Registered Member

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    1000 or .1000? I'm assuming that's a reference to batting average, where 10% is not good.
     
  8. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    If you’re referring just to this CBT discussion, it seems the only issue is CBT not being available when it should be and of course the resulting clutter in the Event Viewer log. Not great of course, but not a massive problem either, at least for typical use cases. A cursory look at the release notes for V7 and even V6 will reveal that there have always been issues of some form or another. There will never be a time when you can upgrade and be guaranteed to be bug-free — which I would argue is the case with virtually any software. But to answer your last question, I’m not aware of any widespread issues with the current release of V7 that you need to look out for, at least other than this one, but it’s not clear how widespread it is yet.
     
  9. EASTER

    EASTER Registered Member

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    100% would been more precise and less likely for the period to indicate different. As in perfect record. Thanks-removed the dot :cool:
     
  10. Hadron

    Hadron Registered Member

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    I can confirm that by disabling CBT in each partition via the Actions menu, that it doesn't stop the errors in Event Viewer. I will have to uninstall CBT completely.
    It would interesting to see if any others running the latest v7 (7.2.4156) are getting MRCBT errors in Event Viewer.
     
  11. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    In the thread I linked previously, the OP came back and found Event Viewer errors like yours. He was asked by Macrium to submit a support ticket and he did, so we'll see what happens.
     
  12. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    There's no need to do anything to "prep" the target disk prior to running a restore in any scenario. If existing partitions need to be deleted to perform the restore job you've specified, that will happen automatically, and there's definitely no need to format partitions that are going to be blown away immediately afterward during the restore job. In fact, that practice would prevent RDR from ever being used, because RDR requires the partition from which the backup was originally captured to still exist on disk at the time of the restore. The partition on disk also cannot have been shrunk since the time of the backup that's being restored.
     
  13. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Or defragmented?
     
  14. TheRollbackFrog

    TheRollbackFrog Imaging Specialist

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    I didn't say it wasn't recommended... or I didn't mean to make it sound that way. It looked like you were asking about the difference between image restoration and Clean Installation to a freshly wiped HDD. If there's no existing comparable System configuration already existing on that HDD (you said it was wiped), RDR cannot do difference restoration to it... it will do a FULL restore even if you ask for RDR restoration.

    RDR has never failed me since its release in 2015 in v6... that's all I ever use.
     
  15. TheRollbackFrog

    TheRollbackFrog Imaging Specialist

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    RDR will happily restore an image to a recently defragmented partition as long as the size of the partition doesn't change... it just won't be very "RAPID." :)
     
  16. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    That isn't mentioned in Macrium's documentation as a problem for RDR, and just thinking about it I don't see why that would pose a problem. I can certainly see why it would mean RDR would have more work to do, though. That said, I haven't actually tested capturing an image, defragmenting the source volume, and then running a restore to see if RDR gets used.
     
  17. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Thanks, that's what I expected. No problem.
     
  18. EASTER

    EASTER Registered Member

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    That's some pretty smart engineering built into it alright. Although as I mentioned previously, I've yet to set up a process utilizing this great useful feature (RDR)-these suggestions and recommendations go a long way in shortening any uncertainty that it might have introduced. Sometimes methods (special features) stick better so to speak when laid out in brief like with these replies.
     
  19. TheRollbackFrog

    TheRollbackFrog Imaging Specialist

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    @EASTER - if you just do the full image restore to the disk (none of the prep work), it will work just fine... Reflect takes care of all that other junk. And if the restore is done to an SSD (and the TRIM option is set during the restore <it's the DEFAULT>), Reflect will also TRIM the SSD properly (all the clusters it intends to restore) prior to the image restoration... something that I think no other imaging software does at this time. This insures that old SSD DATA isn't carried around ad infinitum until a proper LIVE SSD optimization has been performed.
     
  20. EASTER

    EASTER Registered Member

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    Thanks @TheRollbackFrog-It's an old habit of mine stretching back, well, for as long as we've had HDD's (mechanical spindle type).
    Advancements such as incorporated within MR, I realize relieves users of that practice anymore. I've found myself on numerous occasions where concerns a HDD with a previous partition on it (any sort), prepping it by running various wipes with pseudorandom's-zero's etc. in advance of new installs which used to be often recommended for users who were bit with virus or other malwares.

    I often still run my disks through that routine sometimes just to ensure a smooth clean as possible disk surface where finicky Windows (or even some software's) wouldn't stumble on a leftover cluster/sector or even a group of them triggering an additional I/O READ. If the program was well fashioned enough, it might pick up on that and stall for a moment. That was the encounter that cropped up more than a few times on me if I simply just deleted a previous Windows partition.

    Thanks however for some info to the SSD handling by MR.
     
  21. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Back in the Windows XP days, I performed a clean install every 12-18 months because there was a half-true joke that Windows had a half-life of about that amount of time, i.e. after that period it was only half as fast as it was before. With Windows 7, that didn't seem to happen anymore, so I stopped doing scheduled clean installs. However, I think I'll end up doing one with Windows 10 1903. It's the first Win10 release in a while that has a feature I'm actually interested in (Windows Sandbox), and I think my current build has been through 3-4 Windows 10 "feature update" releases by now. I don't know if it will be any faster, but (perhaps a bit irrationally) I do like the idea of starting fresh every now and then, because cruft does accumulate over the course of application updates/patches, installations and uninstallations, etc. But that's easy for me to say because thanks to working in IT and having a relatively simple application environment, I can finish a clean install in maybe 3-4 hours. If I worked slowly and/or had a complex environment to set up, then I might think differently.

    However, I do ALWAYS start with a clean install on a new system. I know that Reflect offers ReDeploy to migrate an image from one PC onto another one, but even if you don't run into issues like BIOS vs. UEFI or Windows activation problems because the PCs were licensed for different versions of the OS, I just don't like the idea of carrying over a Windows installation that contains drivers, utilities, and background services meant for one set of hardware onto another system that has a different set of hardware. And again, the fact that a clean install is a fairly short affair for me certainly makes it more compelling.
     
  22. CloneRanger

    CloneRanger Registered Member

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    Well i hope everything is ok !

    Thanks for yours, & others continued posts, & in general on Macrium. Very helpful to new users :thumb:
     
  23. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Happy to help! If you're completely new to Reflect, then one thing I suspect you'll find (and one of the main reasons I'm as involved as I am in the Macrium forums) is that Macrium is unusually responsive. If you go to the Macrium forums, there are Macrium employees participating, and those people are the actual developers, not minimally technical customer service agents as is typical on vendor forums. As a result, when a problem gets reported, they jump on it, and if it turns out to be a bug with Reflect, it tends to get fixed rather quickly. There are also many examples of Macrium implementing new features or changes based on customer feedback. Looking over the release notes just since 7.2 launched last October, 6 of the items in those notes came from reports/requests just from me, and I remember forum threads created by others that led to many of the others. I was also one of the people involved in beta testing what became Reflect 7.2 and Rescue Media Builder, during which time I submitted something like 35 items, a mixture of bug reports and enhancement suggestions, over a period about 2 months -- and Macrium addressed/implemented every one of them except the suggestion to change the Create Rescue Media an icon, which they said they'd defer until a larger artwork update. I also pushed for the "completed with warnings" job outcome based on my own experience and forum reports from others where that type of outcome would have helped if it existed, and that was introduced with 7.2.

    I'm willing to take the time to do those things because Macrium has proven that it's not wasted effort, since they actually accept and act on customer feedback. And the other reason I do this is because backups are important, but users often misunderstand key concepts or best practices, or simply encounter issues because disk imaging backup/restore solutions touch on a lot of fairly technical areas, so I try to help where I can. On the latter subject, the fact that Macrium's documentation is better than most helps many, but of course not everyone reads the manual. :)
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2019
  24. layman

    layman Registered Member

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    I'm mentioning this here, rather than the Macrium forum, since I see no indication that it's a widespread problem with the update to 7.2.4156. This is just a heads-up to make certain that post-update you are still running the version you think you are running.

    The update appeared to run fine on the four machines in our home running Home Edition. However, the following day, one machine had a notification that the scheduled overnight incremental file and folder backup had failed. Checking the log, there was nothing current in the file and folder logs. In the image logs, however, was an overnight entry that said this feature (F&F Backup) is not supported by the free version of Reflect. Hmmm. Sure enough, the updated program's About now listed as the free version.

    For want of a better idea, I decided simply to reinstall. This proceeded normally up to the point the license code was pre-populated. A legitimate-looking code was supplied, but it wasn't one of ours!

    Now, I am not sure what was entailed in the "License Key Edition Change" noted in the bug fixes included in this update, or if it even bears on this incident. I have identified that at least one other program was suddenly missing its license code. Possibly just coincidence, but certainly weird.
     
  25. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    There have been multiple reports on the Macrium forum from people running Windows Insider builds that Reflect would lose its licensing info whenever they installed a new Insider build. Not sure if your system is in the Insider program of course, but did your system potentially update to Windows 10 1809 recently? Microsoft just recently moved it to the "Semi-Annual" branch (formerly known as "Current Branch for Business"), so it's arriving on a new batch of systems now. In fairness, I don't remember this license info loss issue being mentioned when Win10 1809 was released, though.
     
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