Macrium Reflect

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

  1. Tinstaafl

    Tinstaafl Registered Member

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    I've been imaging this encrypted partition for years with Macrium Reflect without issue. And these BSODs occurred with 2 different Macrium releases, 7.2 and 7.3, so it clearly has nothing to do with any recent Macrium updates.

    I've been running Reflect v7.2 without issue since the first release of that version, and now Reflect v7.3 is working well. So I am not saying that Macrium is at fault, just that running it triggered the bug, which ironically appears to be a conflict between a Microsoft AV and a Microsoft driver. :eek:

    Just posted this here in case anyone else sees this error on their machine. Disabling Windows Defender resolved this for me! Never had an issue when I was running Avira AV.

    Just curious jphughan, what AV are you running?
     
  2. jimminy

    jimminy Registered Member

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    I'm wondering if avira left some rubbish on your system after you un-installed it. Lots of antivirus programs do misbehave in this manner. Likely because they are so deeply rooted into the system.
     
  3. Tinstaafl

    Tinstaafl Registered Member

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    Point taken, but I reinstalled Avira Antivirus Pro and Macrium and cng.sys are behaving well again!

    No more BSOD.
     
  4. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Just Windows Defender
     
  5. aldist

    aldist Registered Member

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    Perhaps adding the Marium folder Program Files/ProgramData to Windows Defender exclusions would help.
     
  6. Tinstaafl

    Tinstaafl Registered Member

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    Good idea! But already switched back to Avira and got another BSOD, so that theory is out the window! Been running Avira for years without any issues.

    Macrium to the rescue! Rolled back to an image from this past Saturday morning, and it seems like my PC is stable again! Seems like Windows was suddenly very unstable. I didn't mention it earlier, but I also applied the October Windows updates for Windows 10 2004 this past Sunday. Uninstalled them before the Macrium restore, but still got a BSOD.

    Macrium has saved my bacon once again! :thumb: :)
     
  7. pvsurfer

    pvsurfer Registered Member

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  8. Tinstaafl

    Tinstaafl Registered Member

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  9. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    @Tinstaafl Do you Chrome or Chromium-based browsers? I was just listening to a weekly security podcast and they mentioned a vulnerability that's being exploited in the wild that leverages Cng.sys -- this vulnerability. It's been fixed, and Microsoft expects to fix their portion of this in the November 2020 Patch Tuesday updates.
     
  10. Tinstaafl

    Tinstaafl Registered Member

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    Hi @jphughan just saw your post. I have Chrome installed as a backup browser, and it auto-updates to the latest release. Although Firefox is my default.

    I saw some security bulletins referencing a vulnerability in "Cng.sys" when I was researching my BSOD. It did cross my mind that a "fix" for that may have introduced a bug.

    But since I rolled back to a prior Macrium image (from 10/31) last week, everything has been running stable, with Macrium running a scheduled full image each evening. No more BSODs.

    I have since applied the Microsoft monthly cumulative updates for October, and still looking good here on Win 10 2004.

    Regarding AV, I was testing Bitdefender Free when that image was taken on 10/31. Still looking good in that regard. Giving Avira Pro a break for now, as they are now forcing a lot of "bloatware" onto their Pro users. They have even EOL the older UI so not going back.

    Also, after the restore, I went through and cleaned up "hidden devices" in device manager that were no longer in use, and uninstalled their drivers. Also cleaned up the registry (made a backup of course). System is stable again!

    So I'm not going to ever really know what caused the BSODs. Just had the right (or wrong) mix of variables I presume.

    Kudos to Macrium! The best fix for broken Windows!
     
  11. Chuck57

    Chuck57 Registered Member

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    Found my old Macrium 7.1.2833 and the license key. Installed it today out of curiosity and did a full system backup. For just under 20G it took a few seconds over 13 minutes. Later, I did a restore in 3 minutes 47 seconds. The backup was over a minute faster than Aomei 6.1 Pro and the restore almost 2 minutes faster. I think I'll keep Macrium as my primary and just hang onto Aomei and one backup as a secondary.

    Not sure why, but Macrium won't update to the current version, not that it matters. I'm running an old OS, why not have old software with it?
     
  12. EASTER

    EASTER Registered Member

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    Hi @Chuck57
    Macrium just won't break.
    Its a superb imaging program even many versions back. Still works great with no issues for me too. I always depended on DS before Macrium in times past but Macrium Reflect is just so rapid in it's functioning. I barely give it a second thought anymore because it just does what it's supposed to on my old versions of Windows and that's all anyone can expect of a quality imaging app. And that is being there for the user either in a pinch or simply making clean images & performing restores flawlessly.
    -EASTER
     
  13. Chuck57

    Chuck57 Registered Member

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    Hey, Easter, my old pal from the Power Shadow days. Macrium 7.1.2833 is rock solid, as I think are all their versions. I had v 6 somewhere, saved the .exe to disk. I was surprised the old license worked. Wasn't sure how they handled stuff like that, but no problem. I'd forgotten how good Macrium Reflect is, since I got off on a tangent and started checking out other imaging software.
     
  14. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    7.1.2833 is almost 3 years old at this point. Even if a newer version isn't required for your OS, the list of fixes and enhancements in the Reflect V7 release notes from that version to current is QUITE long. Not all of them will be relevant to you of course, but running one basic backup and one basic restore doesn't guarantee that you won't get jammed up by a bug later on that might have been fixed in a newer release. That's especially possible if you end up in a restore scenario that might require you to use ReDeploy, for which there have definitely been some enhancements since the version you're running. If your Reflect installation won't auto-update, I'd suggest downloading the Reflect download agent using the link on this Macrium KB page. That will grab the full installer of whatever edition you need, and from there you should be able to update to the latest release.
     
  15. Chuck57

    Chuck57 Registered Member

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    Good points and things I hadn't thought of. I'll download tomorrow and see if the license works on the newest. Don't see why it shouldn't. It's legit, and registered to me.
     
  16. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    Hi Chuck, the full backup time seems excessive to me, when I perform a full backup of my C drive (50 GB) it takes 3.5 minutes to a USB SSD and 4.5 minutes to a USB standard drive, is your C drive standard or SSD?
     
  17. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    20 GB in 13 minutes is 26 MB/s, assuming the 20 GB is the size of the resulting file rather than the amount of source data. That would be about right for real world USB 2.0, or maybe an old CPU where compression was a bottleneck — or encryption if it was used. If it’s 20 GB of source data, the transfer rate would depend on the size of the resulting file.
     
  18. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    V7 keys are good for all versions of V7, so you should be fine. Good luck! :)
     
  19. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    You are right, there are too many variables to consider. I think with USB 4 doubling the speed of USB 3.2 we might be looking at full backups under 2 minutes (for my given example) and really superfast incremental backups, although incremental times of 90 seconds are already very fast.
     
  20. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Unfortunately, thanks to the infinite wisdom of the USB-IF, USB 3.2 doesn't uniquely identify a particular transfer speed. What we first knew as USB 3.0 was later retroactively renamed to USB 3.1, and then retroactively renamed AGAIN to USB 3.2, so now we have this:

    USB 3.2 Gen 1 = 5 Gbps
    USB 3.2 Gen 2 = 10 Gbps
    USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 = 20 Gbps (I'm not sure this standard was ever implemented anywhere, but it exists at least on paper.)

    With USB4, which is very similar to Thunderbolt 3, the bottleneck is going to shift to the performance of the storage, at least in the short term. In fact unless you have an NVMe SSD running over Thunderbolt, storage performance is already the bottleneck, because even USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) is fast enough to allow a SATA SSD to operate at max performance thanks to UASP reducing the impact of USB protocol overhead -- although I guess if you had a SATA SSD storage array, that would be another matter. Then again, even USB 3.2 Gen 2 is still relatively rare. Even systems that have USB-C ports often only support Gen 1, and finding Gen 2 support on USB-A ports is even harder. (I do have this handy mini-dock that supports it though.) So I guess in the real world, there are still plenty of setups where the bus is the bottleneck.

    But even today's NVMe SSDs have only JUST started to fully saturate a Thunderbolt/USB4 link even on read speeds, never mind write speeds that are more relevant to your scenario. PCIe 4.0 recently opened the door to even faster NVMe SSDs, but TB/USB4 will still be limited to 40 Gbps, and PCIe 3.0 x4 (TB/USB4's current max setup) already allows 32 Gbps, and I'm not sure TB/USB4 will support PCIe 4.0. Also keep in mind that many real world Thunderbolt use cases involve carrying DisplayPort traffic as well in order to run an external display, e.g. through a Thunderbolt dock. And DisplayPort gets priority over PCIe when there isn't enough bandwidth to go around. So if you're running a decently high end display setup, you won't actually have 32 Gbps of bandwidth available for storage.

    I think in most real world cases, the barrier to superfast backups is the cost of fast storage, not the availability of fast interconnects. I'm definitely not buying a 2-4 TB NVMe SSD to use for backups, and that idea is even less appealing to my clients who use a rotation of multiple destination storage devices.
     
    Last edited: Nov 17, 2020
  21. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    Osaban,

    Using NVMe to NVMe is even faster. Fresh 50 GB Win10 partition with 16 GB of data. No hibernation file otherwise the data would be 29 GB.
    Backup time 8 seconds.
    Restore time 3 seconds.

    Edit... Hibernation was turned on and data was 29 GB. Backup and restore times were unchanged.
     
    Last edited: Nov 17, 2020
  22. aldist

    aldist Registered Member

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    I am using Macrium Reflect v7.1.3317 on Windows 10 x64, performed dozens of backups and restorations. This is the latest version with a distribution size of 67mB, in the next versions it has grown to 100-110mB. Works great and suits me all. Why would I change it to v7.3? Have you forgotten how many unsuccessful versions of the program were when the developer was forced to change and fix something in a fire order? Are you sure that new bugs will not come with the new version that were missing in previous versions?
    https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/macrium-reflect.356309/page-339#post-2951400
     
  23. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    As usual thank you for your very informative replies... I feel embarrassed, I didn't even know of the existence of NVMe SSDs.
     
  24. Osaban

    Osaban Registered Member

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    I can't even imagine this kind of speed, is such a system very expensive?
     
  25. Chuck57

    Chuck57 Registered Member

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    2015 era HP 355G2 laptop, 8G RAM, 1TB HDD. I'm saving to an even older WD 500GB Passport. And the port is USB 2. AMD A-6 6310 quad core processor at 1.80GZ.
     
    Last edited: Nov 17, 2020
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