I have presented the idè to them, long ago, that when one is about to restore there should be a box to "tick" that inactivates all these boxes one has to tick to get the restore running. That would do it much simpler and way faster. Maybe a "are you shure" box instead when starting the restore. When one is a experienced user thoose boxes are just annoying. Pointless. I know that i am not alone in this thinking, many others have suggested and said the same thing to them and on different forums. That would be a really good feature to add to a new version. If you agree to the above, is that something you could forward. Please
It's a little late for new v8 ideas (there's a whole Macrium Forum section for a WishList) but I'll be happy to pass it along during the process.
That`s what i hoped for. Wish list for v.8? Wishing i have done before as i said, like others, but nothing happens. It would reduce the restore time a lot so it is a little incomprehensible that they do not do it. All it would mean is to hand over the decision to the user, and that is a good thing.
In Macrium's case, other than their own planned technological improvements, most of any other new "features" are derived directly from their user's WishList. It never hurts to express yourself publicly in that area of their Forum.
I wouldn't hold your breath. Take a look at this item in the release notes of 7.2.4325, released 10 June 2019: Clone and Restore Confirmation We've added an additional confirmation check box when overwriting a Clone or Restore target disk. This offers Reflect users unfamiliar with the result of a Restore/Clone operation the opportunity to confirm or deny the overwrite operation. Prior to that release, a clone or restore that would involve deleting or overwriting existing partitions would trigger a popup dialog listing the partitions to be deleted/overwritten, and the user had to click Continue. From that release forward, that popup dialog has a checkbox that the user has to check before they can click Continue. So it would seem that Macrium's overall impression from its customers was that the previous design still wasn't enough of a warning to prevent accidental deletions or overwrites. So I wouldn't count on them providing a way to bypass the "sanity checks". I realize it's always possible to say, "You can keep the default behavior as-is for newbies, but give the experts something else." And sometimes that absolutely makes sense. But it's also true that adding more options increases the complexity of the application and the interface, and there are plenty of users who already find Reflect's interface rather complicated. So the question is whether an option to save a few clicks that might satisfy some power users is worth the additional complexity that will be noticed even by some people who won't care about it. And more fundamentally there's the reality that even the power users make mistakes sometimes. I personally don't think it's unreasonable to ask for confirmation before operations like this. But as TheRollbackFrog said, there's a Wish List section on the Macrium forums, and Macrium has been known to grant wishes made there.
I don't mind the extra clicks to enable a restore. It's a good safety feature, and good finger exercise I looked at the new beta version features page. I sure don't like that "dark" mode, but that seems to be super popular bling these days. Very hard to read but I guess it goes good with all the RGB stuff. I AM surprised they made it the default mode. Hope it's not too difficult to get rid of.
It's not a matter of bling at all. Dark Mode can be hard to read depending on the contrasting colors that the developer chooses to pair with the black background, but that's an implementation problem, not an inherent problem. But having used Dark Mode on iOS since it arrived in iOS 13 (with a setting to automatically switch between Dark and Light at sunset and sunrise), I quite like it. If you use your PC at late hours and/or in areas that don't have bright ambient lighting, working with an application that has a substantial amount of white space can be very rough on one's eyes -- and Reflect's interface has a LOT of white space if you've got it maximized. Having large displays only exacerbates this problem. Older versions of MS Word used to have an option to have Word display pages as white text on a blue background rather than black text on a white background, but that disappeared quite a while ago.
Ah, good to hear that I am not alone. That's what I meant when I wrote in some of my last posts that for me the interface is terrible. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to find out how to create or to restore an image. The paradox is that in practice it works relatively easy in spite of all this confusion on the interface.
Thank you for the (long) explanation! I’m considering buying a much larger (external) drive to use (incremental) imaging instead of cloning in 2021 (I was hoping not to spend any money on this PC anymore, since I hope to buy an M1 iMac later this year). One partition on this PC contains a few, large, VeraCrypt images (but a lot of regular files as well) that change (a bit) weekly. I guess these will always be included in full in an incremental image? How can I better handle them?
VeraCrypt container files won’t have to be included in full if you use Incremental imaging, in fact even Reflect’s F&F backup engine can avoid backing up modified files in their entirety and can instead avoid backing up “cluster runs” that have not changed, as Macrium Support explained it. The challenge with F&F is that you’d have to enable the option to allow VeraCrypt to update the Date Modified timestamp, which is not enabled by default. But an image backup isn’t an issue at all.
Another issue related to CBT. This one has been acknowledged by Macrium and is quite serious for anybody accessing NTFS volumes from Linux: https://forum.macrium.com/42212/CBT-unreliable-when-NTFS-volume-was-modified-by-Linux
In defense of Macrium, this is NOT a CBT issue, This is a LINUX issue that Macrium must find a workaround to deal with until the LINUX community fixes their issue. If you don't Dual-boot into LINUX or any new Linux-based (as in just released Linux kernel) Recovery Media, no change is needed Users may continue using CBT if they dual-BOOT with Linux but they must use the REFLECT menu item "Other tasks/Edit Defaults/Advanced Incrementals" and insure that the "Reset CBT on reBOOT" option is checked in the lower RIGHT PANE menu area. This will allow CBT to reset itself during System restarts.
True enough. I reworded my post above. You're quite right that CBT isn't at fault here, but it's also true that this is yet another case of problems that can be encountered by people who use CBT, and avoided by not using it (or as you say, configuring it to operate in a way that is no longer the default as of Reflect 7.2.)
MR WinPE uses a trimmed version of TextEdit Notepad to open .txt files, but the bad news is that TextEdit doesn't support Unicode. It would be nice to add Unicode support to a text editor, while I have to use NotePad2 for this
I had some enhancement requests for their PE Explorer file manager app, but their response was basically that PE Explorer is meant as a “get out of jail free” convenience app and therefore isn’t something they really want to invest development time improving since that would take away from time on Reflect. They did however update that app when someone was bit by the fact that PE Explorer originally didn’t even have a confirmation prompt when deleting things.
Resolved the problem of correct display of unicode in text files from under WinPE MR. From under Windows, I configured NotePad2 to fit my needs - default encoding, toolbar, then save settings. NotePad2 consists of two files, notepad2.exe and notepad2.ini. I rename the files to textedit.exe and textedit.ini, respectively. In DISM ++, I edited boot.wim, removed the original textedit.exe and placed the previously prepared textedit.exe and textedit.ini there. Done. Copy / paste unicode works correctly, including when paste into the window for composing a comment to the image. I am very pleased with the result.
I have to say it's a very smart way to achieve things you need without requiring actual coding knowledge, so that folks like myself can easily follow your method. Thank you for sharing this method.
What would make a renamed "NotePad2" think that it's initialization values were located in a file called "textedit.ini" since it's always looked for "notepad2.ini" in the past? I think you may be dealing with DEFAULTs rather than any real INI values offered in that "textedit.ini" file.
I had such an idea, I checked it and made sure that it reads the settings from textedit.ini. By default, there are many buttons on the toolbar, preparing the files for replacement, I removed half of the buttons, leaving only the most needed. Also enabled the display of Long Line Marker (vertical line at 72 characters) and Highlight Current Line. Replaced files, and all these settings are preserved when running in WinPE. Now I would like to add a screenshoter to the toolbar in WinPE, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that yet. I know that newer versions of MR have this, but I have an old v7.1 and I don't want to change it.
The toolbar is an application that Macrium created, not something native to WinPE, so customizing it will probably be difficult. But Macrium’s PEScreenshots.exe app works in normal (non-Rescue) PE/RE environments, in fact it even works in full Windows. Just run it so that it starts in the background and then it will intercept PrintScreen presses. So if you can get that app to autorun, it will work without needing to be in a taskbar — assuming you’re not on a laptop that dropped the PrintScreen button of course. Why don’t you want to update from 7.1?
Got it, thanks! Taking a screenshot from under WinPE is not a problem in my situation, on the USB flash drive and hdd with WinPE there is a folder with a selection of portable software that can be run in the WinPE environment, among them is a screenshooter that can take screenshots of a window or part of the screen, and not just everything screen. The idea with Macrium’s PEScreenshots.exe is good, I’ll try it too, but I’ll hardly be able to add it to the toolbar. I tried all the new versions that came out in order to form my opinion about them. v7.1 is small, you know that the next distribution has doubled further. It works flawlessly on Windows 10, so after a while I returned to it and stopped my choice.
Yes, the Reflect 7.2 installer grew quite a bit over 7.1. I asked Nick at Macrium Support about that and he said it was related to the new Rescue Media Builder being packaged to be usable as a standalone application, which it wasn't for earlier versions. I don't remember whether that significantly affected the size of the generated Rescue Media though. That said, the difference in installer size and even Rescue Media size isn't enough for that to be a major factor in my decision of whether to use it. If 7.1 works for you, then fantastic. But I'd still recommend keeping an eye on the release notes, because in addition to the possibility of an improvement that you might appeal to you, I've helped several people on the Macrium forums who stuck to old versions because "they worked fine" -- except they were only looking at the old version's ability to perform backups. It turned out that their old version wasn't able to RESTORE quite right. Macrium has implemented bug fixes and improvements since 7.1 that only pertain to restore scenarios, which in many cases isn't something you'll always notice until you really need your restore to work.
Got it, thanks! Repeatedly I had to do a system restore, not because of a breakdown, but to switch to a different configuration, there were no problems. But I am following the development of Reflect. The option with PEScreenshots works, in WinPE v7.1 this file is already there, but the button is not yet there. Snap-PE https://sites.google.com/site/sqamanual/home/mainnav/downloads works the same, has a GUI, saves in jpg, from under WinPE the visual quality of screenshots is the same as that of PEScreenshots. But the highest quality comes from WinSnap.
