Macrium Reflect

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

  1. Peter 123

    Peter 123 Registered Member

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    Thanks for your explanations, jphughan. Maybe that finally I will stay with a new 64-bit system to avoid such difficulties.

    But would the following be a (technically) feasible procedure?
    1. I buy a new PC (64-bit) and create immediately an image of its disk (that means before installing or changing anything) ("Image 1").
    2. I transfer (on a trial basis) my old 32-bit system to the new PC by using the feature "ReDeploy Restored Image to new hardware" of Macrium's Home Edition (--> the bare metal restore).
    If then all works fine I stay with this solution. If problems arise (e.g. as described in your posting) I go to step 3:
    3. I restore "Image 1" bringing back the new PC in its original condition (and afterwards I set up all my programs etc. from scratch within the 64-bit system).

    And a second question:
    Is my assumption correct that an image created of a 32-bit system is of no use in case that I want to continue with a 64-bit system? Or are there any parts (or whatever) of the image which could be useful when performing the setup of the 64-bit system?
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2020
  2. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    I thought about it in past but for now I don't see it as necessary. I doubt that data on all 4 disks would get destroyed at the same time. It could happen but IMO it's not very likely.
     
  3. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    I would confirm whether 32-bit drivers are available for all of your new system's hardware before even attempting that process, but if the drivers exist and you were willing to continue operating on no more than 4GB of RAM, then yes in theory the process you describe should work -- and you would indeed still have the option to restore the 64-bit installation (or just perform a fresh install). The only potential snag there is Windows activation. For best chance of success there, make sure your new PC comes with a license for the same edition of Windows (Home vs. Pro) as the image you would be ReDeploying onto it. Better yet would be to link your old PC's Windows license to your Microsoft account, in which case you could choose to reassign that license to your new PC, but that isn't always an option depending on how your old PC received its Windows license -- and some people don't want to link their Window logon to their Microsoft account, which is required for that mechanism.

    A 32-bit Windows image is of no real use when setting up a 64-bit system, except that you can of course retrieve your personal data out of it, and then some application config files, depending on the application. As for migrating the application themselves, I wouldn't recommend that. Apparently there are utilities that will try to do that for you, but I only know that because somebody posted in the Macrium forums about problems they encountered after they tried that. Basically, they used some tool to migrate Reflect 32-bit over to 64-bit Windows. The result was that not only did Reflect refuse to work, but the user also wasn't able to install Reflect 64-bit over it or uninstall the existing Reflect application. Both of those activities resulted in error messages. I ended up pointing them to a Microsoft utility that can purge all references to an application from the Windows Installer database, which did allow a new Reflect 64-bit installation to proceed, but that's obviously messy.
     
  4. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Natural disasters and burglaries
     
  5. Peter 123

    Peter 123 Registered Member

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    @jphughan: Thank you for your useful information. I will take it into account when the moment comes to take a decision.
     
  6. paulderdash

    paulderdash Registered Member

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    True, but in these eventualities, possibly just offsite backup of data is sufficient - not necessarily whole images ... most likely systems would need replacing too?
     
  7. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Paul,

    I'd keep OS images too as there is a good chance you will get these working on new hardware. If you want to install a fresh OS you can do it later, at your leisure.
     
  8. paulderdash

    paulderdash Registered Member

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    Ha! It is comforting to know you are around here too Brian, in case of imaging issues! :)
     
  9. sdmod

    sdmod Shadow Defender Expert

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    With all due respect, I think that the 'As you surely know, you should do it for the sake of security' is questionable.
    People have been fighting (and are still fighting) until they become blue in the face having installed Winbows IO to maintain a reasonable degree of security and privacy. One of the most intrusive and insecure Operating Systems of all time out of the box. It tries to own you in many ways which many find unacceptable. Very difficult by user configuration to have any security against it's 'security'.

     
  10. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    Quite off topic, for someone who claims XP is still a reasonable choice. Your opinion, and not an expert opinion on Win10, thank you.
     
  11. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    Yes those can happen. But in that case lost data probably won't be my biggest concern.
     
  12. Scott W

    Scott W Registered Member

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    I'm the only 'active' user account on my system, so I was wondering if I would incur any adverse consequences if I disabled the Macrium Reflect UI Watcher startup entry?
     
  13. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Not sure what it does, but on my system it consumes 0% CPU and 4 MB of RAM, so I personally wouldn't consider tinkering with it to be a favorable risk/reward proposition. I get an fully support the concept of keeping your system as simple as possible to meet your needs, but I would argue that disabling things via mechanisms that the vendor does not support or recommend is ADDING complexity, not reducing it -- especially if you don't have a clear understanding of what the component does or what the ramifications of disabling it would be. I've had a few too many times where I tinkered with something and didn't notice adverse consequences until later, by which point I'd sort of forgotten about my tinkering -- so I ended up losing a bunch of time and hair troubleshooting the issue before I finally remembered that one tweak that sounded like such a good idea at the time, and which turned out to be the underlying cause of the problem I didn't encounter until later. The gratification of having finally solved the problem was rather offset by the knowledge that I had no one but myself to blame for having to suffer the problem in the first place.

    I don't know exactly what the UI Watcher does, and therefore don't know what the ramifications of preventing it would be. But given that it seems fairly unlikely to cause conflicts with other applications or services on my system and it's only consuming 4 MB of RAM out of my 32 GB installed, it isn't enough for me to worry about, personally.
     
  14. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    I’m not sure that would be true for everyone. Might depend on how much of your data is irreplaceable, such as photos as opposed to a music library that could be redownloaded, albeit with a lot of effort. I personally use cloud backups only for my critical data that is in fact irreplaceable. It’s not a lot in terms of capacity, so the required cloud storage is cheap.

    And honestly, would data loss HAVE to be your biggest concern to justify the relatively small amount of money and effort to avoid the data loss problem entirely?
     
  15. Minimalist

    Minimalist Registered Member

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    Yes, that's also the question I ask myself. So far I find my current backup sufficient. I'm not trying to achieve 100% security and am happy with cca 99%.
     
  16. imdb

    imdb Registered Member

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    same here. and it's worth every penny.
     
  17. Peter 123

    Peter 123 Registered Member

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    Just now I was notified about the Macrium update to version 7.2.4952.

    According to their website these are the changes:
    ( http://updates.macrium.com/reflect/v7/v7.2.4952/details7.2.4952.htm)

    I do not have installed the Guardian. May this be the reason that when trying to download the update I get an error message "HTTP Error - 403"?

    EM.jpg

    So would it be the best for me simply to ignore this update?
     
  18. xxJackxx

    xxJackxx Registered Member

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    This is what happens when they update the notification before actually posting the update to the server. It will eventually work. Until then it is yet another embarrassing mistake on their part.
     
  19. Peter 123

    Peter 123 Registered Member

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    Thanks, xxJackxx. Good to hear. Usually I am lazy in installing updates. So this time I was too quick. :D
     
  20. xxJackxx

    xxJackxx Registered Member

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    You were. :D
    It looks like they may have pulled this altogether. The updater now says I'm up to date though I have updated nothing.
     
  21. Buddel

    Buddel Registered Member

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    No problems here. I just got v7.2.4952 via internal updater.
     

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  22. Peter 123

    Peter 123 Registered Member

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    It worked for me too in the meantime. :thumb:
     
  23. xxJackxx

    xxJackxx Registered Member

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    Updated here as well. I hope there are no issues with it.
     
  24. Spartan

    Spartan Registered Member

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    anyone else tired of their bi-daily updates like it was a virus signature update? This only tells me lack of quality
     
  25. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    I'd certainly rather have quick fixes than delayed fixes. Of course not needing fixes at all would certainly be ideal, but arguably isn't realistic. Reflect V7 does seem to have a lot more updates than V6 ever did, largely due to the fact that V7 introduced two persistently running, low-level background components -- namely CBT and Image Guardian -- and it turns out that those types of components increase the likelihood of conflicts and other strange behavior. However, there also seem to be more occasions these days of updates that fix problems that were only introduced by the immediately preceding update, as opposed to longstanding bugs that simply hadn't been discovered before.

    But for people tired of updates, there's of course no obligation to install each and every update -- in fact for people who actually read release notes, there's something to be said for specifically NOT doing that. On the systems I support for clients, I only install Reflect updates when I see something in the release notes that is or could potentially be relevant to the client. Otherwise, I take the "If it ain't broke" viewpoint. But you do have to read the release notes, because I've seen people take that viewpoint simply on the grounds that their backups are working, and then later on when they want to restore something, they encounter a problem that had already been fixed in an update they never installed. The fact that backups are running does not necessarily mean that you should never update. Backups are not the only thing that need to work, since backups are only any good if you can actually restore them.

    One option that would make it easier to update "selectively" -- and which already has a Wish List thread on the Macrium forums -- would be to have an option to have the Reflect update checker that appears in the system tray ignore a specific release, and only reappear in the tray when an even newer release arrives. Right now, you either need to install the update, let that icon sit in your system tray, or disable background update checking.
     
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