Guys today I made a backup of my C: Drive which has 200GB in use. The backup took 20 mins to complete as I had to back it up on my 2nd drive in my laptop which is a slow Seagate FireCuda 2TB SSHD. The weird thing though is, when I wanted to restore that backup today as I was testing some apps which I didn't like (Stardock's Windows Blinds is a joke on Windows 10), the restore only took 2 minutes!? What kind of Voodoo Magic is this?
@Spartan - as @kC_ suggests, the RDR mode (Rapid Delta Restore) of REFLECT only restores the DATA blocks to the disk that are changed as a result of the restoration... all the others remain. This operation will be quick and accurate as only the DATA that has changed since your original FULL will be restored back to the FULL's DATA state. This feature arrived in February 2015 with the introduction of v6.
Wow! That's insane man! How fast and accurate it was. By the way, I have the Home Edition not the free edition. I never install it on my system though, I just install it once when it's updated to make the Macrium Reflect Rescue Disk and boot off that to make or restore images. I have partitioned a very fast Patriot Supersonic 2 Flash Drive a 1GB for Macrium Reflect and the rest to a separate partition where I store all the images.
@Spartan - be advised, the FREE edition DOES NOT SUPPORT the special RDR mode so restores using that media will be like most other imaging software, complete DATA restores. Only Recovery Media created by the HOME Edition will have RDR available... at least that's the way it's supposed to be.
I am aware of that, that's why I install my Home Edition and then create the Rescue Media so it would be the full fledged version with the RDR mode (which as I just experienced, restored my image in 2 mins)
Yeah, Rapid Delta Restore is one of the killer features of paid Reflect, probably the #2 benefit after Incremental backups. There's also a Rapid Delta Clone feature that works basically the same way, i.e. after you clone one disk to another once, subsequent clone jobs only have to carry over the changes rather than copying the entire partition over every time. But if you don't keep Reflect installed on your system, just be aware that Macrium does occasionally post Reflect updates containing bug fixes and/or enhancements that pertain to the Rescue environment. So you may want to keep an eye on the release notes to determine when it would be appropriate to reinstall Reflect to update your Rescue Media to avoid potentially stumbling on a bug when you actually need your Rescue Media to work. Here is the link to the release notes for the V7 release track. Changes that affect Rescue Media are typically called out in red text for easy discovery. If you want to bookmark that page, do so using the URL I linked, NOT the URL that will show in your browser bar after you click it. The reason is that the link I posted always redirects to a static page for the release notes of the version that's current at the time, so if you bookmark the page where you end up, you'll only ever see the notes for the version that was current when you made the bookmark. Or fyi you could consider just keeping Reflect installed without installing the CBT or Image Guardian components in order to keep those those low-level, system-wide, persistent features off your system. You'll still have a Macrium Service running in the background as well as ReflectMonitor, but the resource utilization of those components is negligible, and they're not apt to cause conflicts that Image Guardian and especially CBT have in the past. It's pretty convenient to be able to capture images from within Windows rather than having to take your system offline and leave it that way until your backup completes, and the VSS technology that makes it possible to do that safely has been around for quite some time now.
1) I regularly check Major Geeks for updates. 2) I do remote tuning & and optimization services for a company so when I Install Macrium Reflect for a client, I would know there is a new version since it would automatically prompt for an update in which case when I'm on my system, I would re-download the latest version. 3) If i install Macrium Reflect, wouldn't the CBT consume resources as it's trying to see what's changed? That's the reason I don't install it as I want the 100% performance on my laptop but please correct me if I'm wrong. 4) When you update Macrium Reflect, the patch is usually very small, would it only patch the program or it would also patch the Macrium Reflect environment which you create since restorations have to be done outside of Windows? I'm juust worried that it doesn't update that Macrium reflect component and only updates the program Again, please correct me if I'm wrong.
1) Not sure why you'd check Major Geeks when you can get news about updates directly from Macrium at the URL I provided. 2) I suppose that works if you're doing a lot of installs as long as you read the release notes. Just figured the URL would be handy since it's a quick click and instantly brings up the entire release history for Reflect V7, so you can see everything that's changed since whatever version you used for your Rescue Media. 3) When you install Reflect, you can choose not to install CBT or Image Guardian at all. Those are both optional components, and if you don't install them in the first place, then obviously they won't run. However, if all you're concerned about is performance rather than conflicts (the latter has been an issue though, fyi), Macrium themselves have addressed those concerns extensively on their forum because users definitely asked. Some people were worried about CPU utilization, memory consumption, and even SSD write wear due to CBT having to track changes. The short version is that CBT's activity is practically nothing across all of those resources, so the idea that you'd notice a performance difference simply isn't plausible. I'll see if I can dig up the posts on the Macrium forum about this. But again, conflicts have definitely been an issue, so if you don't need or care about CBT's benefit, I'd recommend leaving it off your system for that reason alone. 4) When you install a Reflect update, it doesn't immediately touch the Rescue Media files. You have to go into Rescue Media Builder and have it rebuild Rescue Media as a separate step. But every Reflect patch can technically update Rescue Media because Rescue Media Builder always incorporates the latest Reflect binaries into the Rescue Media. Whether or not the new version contains any changes that are actually relevant to Rescue is a separate question. Those release are much less common, but they do occur. And fyi just another perk of having Reflect persistently installed that I just thought of. That allows you to browse your image backups within Windows to extract individual files. Have you really never needed to do that, or have you always been willing to reboot into Rescue Media to grab a file out of an older backup?
UPDATE: Found a post on the Macrium forum from Nick (Macrium developer and CEO) about CBT's disk write activity here. I'll see if I can find anything about CPU and memory utilization, but Task Manager should make it pretty clear that CBT isn't spiking those resources. The future update that Nick mentioned as making CBT an optional component arrived a while ago.
Thanks a lot for answering all my questions in detail. Heck you have better answers than Macrium's support themselves I didn't see your link in the previous post but now that you mentioned it I will bookmark that and keep it in the list of Software Updates bookmarks folder that I run daily to check for updates. and no I never need to look at anything in the image, the way I operate is I only install the OS on C: and my personal library files (docs, music, pics, videos) are all moved to the D: drive so if I ever want to backup or go back it's simply because I may have wanted to test a few apps and if I don't like them I go back using Macrium Reflect since I'm OCD about registry leftovers and uninstaller programs tend to find a lot of FPs (I have a license for Revo Uninstaller Pro, Unintstall Tool but the FPs they sometimes find are alarming, one time I uninstalled an Alienware app and Revo showed me many leftovers for my installed Adobe products!) I read the post you linked below from Macrium's forums. Thanks a lot for that, I read it and understand that CBT doesn't consume murch resources or space. But I still prefer to not have it installed and just continue to backup/restore using the Rescue Disk.
Does anyone practice placing WinPE Macrium Reflect bootloader on a specially created separate small recovery partition added to BootMenu via EasyBCD? In theory, this will increase the ability to recover in the event of a crash of the Windows boot partition, where WinPE MR registers with standard integration in BootMenu.
I do that for totally different reasons (a System BiOS/hardware anomaly I have that HP never fixed). The best solution for your need, of course, is a separate, non-DISK/System based, Recovery Media (CD/DVD/UFD).
If the partition containing Windows Boot Manager crashes, then the BCD is gone too, fyi. The regular Reflect boot menu option design only requires that the Rescue Media files exist on your Windows OS partition and be readable — so your entire Windows OS itself could be hosed and you’d still be able to use those Rescue Media files under the regular design. The disaster scenario where your design would help would have to be something like file system corruption of just the Windows OS partition. But your proposed design still wouldn’t mean you could safely get rid of external Rescue Media, so ask yourself how likely it is that you would end up in a situation where you wouldn’t be able to use the standard boot menu design but WOULD be able to use your design. Is the likelihood of that scenario and the few seconds/minutes you’d save by booting to that setup rather than getting your external Rescue Media really worth the time you’d spend setting that up and maintaining it as you update your Rescue Media build? I think that would be a tough case to make. Unless you’re just doing it for fun, in which case tinker away!
aldist, You can copy the Macrium UFD to a small (500 MiB FAT32 on any internal drive) partition and Macrium recovery will boot from this partition. This saves using boot media but if your HD fails, you need boot media.
I have never used viBoot and notice as system requirement Windows 8 and above and Microsoft Hyper-V. Does this requirement only refer to the pc running the viboot? If I wanted to install Macrium on Windows 10 with the specific purpose of running a virtual image of XP temporarily, would that be possible? As an explanation, the XP machine is the only one that still allows me to access a router using Java - all new Win10 machines seem to be incapable of running JRE 7. As long as the old pc works, I can boot it up and access the router console to make changes but I would rather have some other options. I am using a Cisco Router ASA-5505 which does not come with a gui, so need to use Java in this case.
viBoot requires a Pro or better edition of Windows 8 or newer because it requires Hyper-V, and those are the Windows versions that have it. But yes that requirement only applies to the VM host system where you have viBoot installed. In terms of the Reflect image backup you want to boot, I've personally booted an XP image backup, but I believe you can boot any image that contains any OS that Hyper-V itself supports -- although when the guest VM itself is a Pro and higher edition of Windows 8 or newer, you can use Hyper-V Enhanced Session Mode, which can be convenient. Also note that the image you boot has to contain all partitions that are necessary for booting, just as would be the case for booting on a real system. I've seen cases where people captured an image backup from a UEFI system, but their image backup only contained their C partition, and then they asked why viBoot wouldn't boot their images. The reason was that they didn't include the other partitions necessary for that purpose, which of course meant that if they ever had to restore their backup onto an empty hard drive in their real system, they would have had the same issue. But viBoot is essentially a tool to a) allow Reflect image backups to be used as Hyper-V virtual disks, b) ReDeploy the Windows environment in the image to support booting in a Hyper-V VM environment, and c) allow capturing new Reflect backups of the VM's modified state if desired. Come to think of it, that ReDeploy portion might mean that viBoot's compatibility is limited to OSes that Hyper-V supports and that Reflect supports ReDeploying, but that would still include XP. I'm not sure about Linux. Reflect certainly doesn't support ReDeploying Linux, but Hyper-V supports certain Linux versions, so if a Linux environment could be "transplanted" from a physical system into a Hyper-V VM without requiring any changes, then viBoot might work with it. I haven't tested that.
May I please ask what this line in the v7.2.4859 changelog means: "Changing the rescue media staging area volume would not always remove all the files on the old volume. This has been resolved." I have not the slightest idea what it means. My English is simply not good enough to understand it. "rescue media staging area volume" ? ? ? Thanks in advance!
If the original "staging area" for the Rescue Media (which is somewhere on your OS volume under ProgramData, I believe... not really important) was changed using the "Edit defaults/Advanced/Macrium Reflect PE files" option, when REFLECT went to move all the important files from that area, apparently it left some in the original area... causing some issues for later builds of the Rescue Media.
Updated to v.7.2.4859. Created new bootable rescue media, tested successfully backup and restore operations.
Just to verify / confirm - best to recreate both boot menu, and bootable rescue media with v.7.2.4859 - or not necessary?
