Macrium Reflect

I have to ask you Acadia, out of curiosity, why would you backup your system with so many different programs? I decided to have a second one, probably overkill, considering that Macrium never failed in many years, but in your case I’m sure you have some good reasons for doing so, would you care to share?

 

heh, just a hobby. The late Peter2150 just loved playing around with this stuff and I am the same way, but I am no where as proficient as he was ... just having fun. (I know, I know, "Acadia, you've really got to get yourself a life" )
Acadia

 

Wait just an imaging minute here... that IS a life!

 

Heh, Peter and I talked over the phone many times, Froggie, and he often mentioned you.
Acadia

 

Fair enough, therefore I'm happy to see that Macrium is your 'go to' out of all these programs (good reputations there).

 

Hello, Quick Question can I still back up and restore my OS Windows 10 - 22H2 ( OS Build 19045.5608 ) Using Macrium Reflect Home v.8.1.8325, without any issue?

Thanks
Camelia

 

Living in Mexico City and with the cost of the subscription is impossible to pay it for me, and I really avoid "Subscriptions"

Thank you @stapp

 

That is a very common sentiment here, and even on Macrium's own site forum.

Luckily there is a completely adequate (and some like me, argue superior) alternative:

Best Free Windows Backup Software for PCs and Servers in 2025 - Hasleo Backup Suite

HBS has an excellent reputation around here, and a lot of people seem to have refused to sign up for the subscription and switched to HBS. Many of us have used HBS a lot over many months and would choose it over Macrium X even if Macrium was also free.

I intend to use HBS as my primary imaging tool and MR v8.1 as my redundancy tool for the foreseeable future.

 

For some unknown reason I have had nothing but problems trying to use HBS. I have enjoying my PC for many years and once in awhile I run into a problem. One way or another I can fix the problem. On very rare occasions I will have to take the PC to a shop to solve the problem. I want HBS to work, but my PC does not. Last time I tried to install and use HBS my PC bricked and it went for one of those very rare shop visits. The shop owner had a bit of an issue trying to repair, but finally did so. Prior to installing HBS I kept MB installed. I was concerned about having problems reinstalling MR 8.1.8110 (UEFI). Could that have been what caused my problem?

 

No one will be able to help you without a description of your issues. As far as HBS "bricking" your system...yeah, no. I call BS. It's software, not firmware. Software cannot brick a system.

 

I expected a response pretty much as you stated. As far as bricking, I should have wrote locked up instead.

 

Ok. That being the case, what happened when you tried to install HBS? If you expected a similar response then why not just say what happened?

 

Software in rare occasions won’t work properly in some computers, when that happens it is definitely bad luck, or there might be a conflict with other programs. As imaging programs are supposed to restore systems it would be wiser to use another program if one has problems during the installation of a specific one. Luckily there are other choices.

 

Yes, you can, without any problems. You can do the same with the latest free version v8.0 without any inconvenience.

 

I do not know why things happened the way they did. I could not even do a restore with MR after the event.

 

So, you're now saying the issue is with both HBS and Macrium? Yeah, no. Look deeper. There's a common denominator there somewhere; something else other than those two.

 

I agree. I looked and could not find the problem and as I wrote the repair person I had look at it took awhile to find the problem. This is what he does for a living. Your probably thinking why didn't I ask him what exactly went wrong. I am asking myself the the same question.

 

If the issue was both Reflect and HBS, perhaps the issue could be some kind of VSS conflict? I dunno. I'll be thinking about it.

 

https://i.ibb.co/YSNWjZZ/10-0-8447-error-MBR.jpg

This MBR error exists, but has not been fixed!
After restoring a copy of my "System Disk C:", I got 2 disks instead of one!
Macrium ver. from 10.0.8313 to 10.0.8447(Rescue media ISO, any winPE)
The "secondary" disk D(520Mb) is the system Recovery disk. This disk should be hidden from the User, but Macrium ver. 10.0.XXXX has made this disk visible to the User!
Now it's not a "system Recovery disk", but a simple User disk!.
This error occurs on all Macrium releases version 10.0
System: Windows 10 21H2 LTSC [x64]; MBR(BIOS)
There is no such error if I use Macrium ver. 10.0.XXXX and GPT disk partitioning(UEFI)
There is no such error if I use Macrium ver. 7.3 or 8.0 or 8.1(any disk partitioning, GPT(UEFI) or MBR(BIOS)
***
... Hey guys, it's been 6 months since you did THAT... Should I laugh or cry?

 

^ Not sure why that’s happening, but fyi a partition can be BOTH a system recovery partition AND have a drive letter assigned. Having a drive letter assigned just means it’s visible; it doesn’t automatically mean it’s a “basic” partition. And the fix is simply to remove the drive letter assignment using something like Diskpart.

That “Legacy XP” option refers to partition alignment. It has nothing to do with the MBR. Back in the XP days, Windows created the C partition to start on Sector 63. That was fine back then when disks used 512-byte sectors, but it became a problem when disks with 4K sectors arrived. Starting a partition on a sector number that was not evenly divisible by 4 resulted in the partition’s file system clusters not being aligned to underlying disk sectors; every cluster instead partially occupied two different physical sectors. This resulted in a significant performance reduction. HDD vendors developed “alignment” utilities to fix this on XP, and starting with Vista, the default for new installs was to start on Sector 64, thereby avoiding the problem in the first place. (I have no idea why XP defaulted to 63, since it also worked fine on a partition that was realigned.)

Anyway, given that all modern HDDs and SSDs use 4K physical sectors (even though most continue to emulate 512-byte sectors in firmware for legacy compatibility reasons), enabling that option would be a bad idea, since it would essentially realign your partitions from optimized to unoptimized. It wouldn’t solve any boot issues and it would create a new performance issue.

 

This does not create any hope of correcting the error.…
Tell me, is it true that the Macrium programming team has changed?

 

Now Macrium is auto opening the browser to push version X on people, that are happy with version 8.1.
Now I have to block "Macrium Monitor" through firewall, just a heads up.
First time ever this happened, so not cool.

 

I haven't had that happen to me yet.
I'm using v8.1.8325 (Released Date: 21st October 2024).
I wonder why it would take that long to happen.

 

Like you want it to happen?