i keep reading that macrium reflect is quick for backing up and restoring, but as a typical very rough guide how long does it take to restore about 50 gigs ?. i also keep reading that rollback rx 11.xx is more buggy compared to v10.xx can somebody please clarify from experience which parts are worse or improved
Macrium REFLECT's imaging capability is pretty much on track with any other imaging system that offers Incremental imaging. The place where it shines is doing restorations to existing disks with resident LIVE OSes on them. When a restoration is done, it only restores the differences between the resident OS and the one you are returning to... if that's a snapshot of that OS, it happens very quickly. Its CBT (Changed Block Tracking) feature does allow for slightly smaller Incremental images (and restorations) but really isn't significant unless lots of Incrementals are involved in the image restoration. If you're restoring to a <blank> disk or to a disk with a completely different OS on it (Linux, etc.), its restoration speed is comparable to most other imaging Systems. Rollback RX v11 seems to have introduced additional bugs into the Rollback snapshot System (ie, FileSystem corruption for many users... others have no issues) and has not addressed some of its previous major issues (such as providing the important OS TRIM function required to manage Solid State Disks <SSDs> correctly). @carfal , a Wilders user, would be the most knowledgeable user concerning current v10/v11 Rollback RX issues but he may not follow this particular imaging thread. Best to find him HERE on the Wilders Forum or in the Horizon DataSys Rollback Forum.
To add to the above comments, there is at least one other imaging System that is capable of the "delta" restoration feature of REFLECT mentioned above... its called "Drive Image Backup and Restore Suite" and is offered by Terabyte Unlimited HERE. The implementations are different but the result is comparable.
So, CBT comes into play when doing restorations? I thought it was only for faster incremental and differential backups.
Thanks for sharing that page @Hadron. Can't always keep up exact details on the newest release features like I want so is a big help for more study.
@Hadron - only in the aspect that the Incremental images can be so much smaller that restoration of those smaller images will be that much quicker. Other than that, nothing special...
I will add that my knowledge above was derived during the CBT BETA program at the end of v6. At that time CBT was recording "changed blocks" rather than "changed clusters." This may have changed since the introduction of CBT in v7 (blocks to clusters)... and if it did, the Incremental image sizes would be identical in size and no timing gain would occur during restoration, only during imaging.
To answer Garry35's question for a full image backup of approx 50GB. If backing up or restoring to/from a USB 2.0 external hard drive then I'd expect that to take approx 30 minutes. If backing up or restoring to/from a USB 3.0 external hard drive then I'd expect that to take approx 10 minutes. I'd expect these speeds to be roughly the same if the job is done in a running Windows environment or from Macrium's bootable "recovery" environment. I put recovery in quotations because even though the bootable environment is primarily designed for recovery purposes it still includes the capability to create new backups too, indeed many people prefer to create their backups this way. The speed you get in the recovery environment will kowever depend on how well the drivers Macrium include match your PC's hardware. -- JB
If you have a LIVE FileSystem on a partition (OS or otherwise), AND the image you are restoring is a previous time point in the evolution of that very same FileSystem, REFLECT will only restore the differences between the two FileSystems (previously imaged and LIVE) and leave anything else that didn't change, alone. Macrium calls this RDR or Rapid Delta Restore. It's "rapid" because it doesn't have to restore the whole FileSystem that was imaged, just the changes from the current FileSystem to the restored FileSystem. Since v3, Terabyte Unlimited's "Drive Image Backup & Restore" can do the same, although a bit cryptically compared to Reflect. Almost every other imaging System on the market does FULL restores when they complete an image restoration, even if the restore is being done to the same FileSystem. REFLECT must do a FULL restore as well if the restoration area is <BLANK> or has some other non-identifiable FileSystem on it when the restoration is done. This is one of the main reasons I finally abandoned Rollback RX when Reflect v6 arrived on the scene (Feb2015) with RDR in place. If I take an Incremental image before doing something stupid (or dangerous) to my System, and it turns out bad for me, I just do a restore to that image and the restoration process, including the loading of Reflect's Recovery Media is just a tiny bit slower than using Rollback RX. This was a big win for me AND my System now that Rollback was no longer resident on that System (very risky piece of software). I haven't looked back since. I do a lot of System testing using this feature (which is set as the DEFAULT, I believe) and have never had an issue of any kind.
So people can compare, i5 8th generation + 8gb ram + SSD Nvme m2 Weekly Incrementals Forever mode on 33gb system: 1st full backup = ~5mn 1st incremental = ~30sec-1mn, depending the amount of changes of the system. Average writing speed ~700-800mb/sec.
Yes, which is a huge difference in restoration speeds when it comes to general discussions on imaging software. A lot of people don't seem to understand the concept here... especially as it pertains to the speed of the restoration process.
I place reliability way, way ahead of speed. In fact, I don't need speed at all at the expense of reliability, and it seems to be that Reflect v7 has given me that. I don't sit there timing backups and restorations.
guest, Is that the Transfer rate shown while the image is being created? Are you imaging a partition on the NVMe SSD to a spinning HD?
My speed comment was based mainly on those of us who have decided to "snapshot" our OS with imagjng tools rather than snapshot tools (Rollback, EazFix which are notoriously unreliable). For normal System jmaging and backup, Reflect has always been completely reliable for me... and truly tested based on the amount of snapshots I have returned to.
While I am still on v6 of MR. I've lost count of the number of restores I've done, can be as many as 30-50 a month. Almost all are RDR restores. Not a single failure. Yep it's reliable
guest, As you know, Macrium reports the Transfer rate in bits but I was confused by Post #15 where you mentioned Bytes. Your Transfer rate would be about 100 MegaBytes/sec. The fastest Transfer rate I've seen was in a mate's computer, 1473 MegaBytes/sec. High end hardware. It took 5 seconds to do a full backup of a fresh Win10 system.
I never had a single failure with v6 either. I stayed with it for a long time until I started getting emails that support had finished, until I finally succumbed.