Macrium Reflect

Understood, and thanks. Sounds like, with a bit of study, MR can be made to do just about anything.

Question: in a paid version do you have to jump through hoops to make the restore disk or will the program guide you through the process. Its not a big deal but I never understood why, when every other program I looked at guided you through the process, that MR wanted you to go there and download that and burn this etc. Is it because the version I was looking at was the free one?

 

According to the speed readout it is not that high but it very variable in speed. It consistently takes that amount of time. AXTM is similar.

I am going from SSD to eSATA HD 7200. Both going to the same drive.

 

Scheduling backups has been discussed at length here, so may I ask if you can do just manual backups instead if you wish like we did in AXTM?

 

Someone may have already answered but incremental looks at the dif between the previous snap and the current one and records the changes between them. Differential looks at the difference between the baseline and each successive snap. So in a baseline 1,2,3 snaps situation the 1st snap is the difference between the baseline and the time of the first snap, the 2nd snap is the difference between the baseline and the time of the 2nd snap, and the 3rd snap is the difference between the baseline and the time of the 3rd snap. This is why, with differential, one of the snaps can become corrupt and you are not toast, all you need to do is pick another snap. With incrementals you need all snaps to be good because it really is a chain.

 

This was the system disk

Just for interest here is the log from Active@

 

Well... I sure can't offer any guidance here.

To compare apples to apples, I took the same 35.1 SYSTEM baseline using ADI v6.0.1, same system, and the ADI time was 5m 19s with the compression looking about the same between the two apps. If you're imaging primarily a SYSTEM partition, I have no idea why your system is so fast (and mine is so slow in comparison ). Our SOURCE and DESTINATION disks seem to be running at the same spec. Are you sure your taking FULL images with ADI and not INCREMENTAL or DIFFERENTIAL? That can sure make a big difference.

 

...uhhh, that's "fan boi," sir.

 

That LOG shows your partition to have only 26.6gB of used data, not 34gB... that will make some difference. Lemme look at the rest of it.

 

Other than the above, I can't see any other anomalies ("Yours is faster than miiiiine... <nah-na-naaaah-nah-naaaaah-na> ).

 

While MR v6 is working (take full backup, snapshot or merge) does it slow down the computer? Do any kind of notification or pop-up appears?
In short, do MR will interrupt my work or worse, my game?

The feature I like the most with AX64 is the auto-merge where it save hourly backup, then only 1 per day, then 1 per week, 1 per month, etc. Can I reproduce that with Macrium? Is the "CUSTOM RETENTION PLAN" the best alternative to what AX64 do?

 

Once you turn off the popup window when a backup starts (by default it is on), you won't notice when it kicks in. My son plays Dragon Age: Inquisition while v6 starts and he doesn't notice a thing. Then again, the computer is on an SSD drive.

 

Can someone give a yes or no? Thanks in advance.

 

You can set it up to run at LOW priority (on a slider) which should also help.

Absolutely! And those AX64 dailies and weeklies and monthlies are all INCREMENTAL snapshots... which means you need every one of them to completely reconstruct your system. With Mv6, you can make any of them DIFFERENTIALS (or even FULLs) which require way less (in snaps, not in storage) to reconstruct a system.

 

Do I have a YES? Absolutely (sorry for the slow response, TWL845)! It can easily be set up to do nothing more than manual snapshots with the ability to WARM restore to wherever your snaps may lead you. If you don't need to COMMENT your manual snaps, this can be set up as a <single-click> from your START MENU or a SHORTCUT on your desktop.

 

Absolutely, yes. You can even create desktop icons of the backup job so you can kick start it whenever you want. It doesn't have to be scheduled. And yes, it can be for full, differential or incremental.

 

According to explorer there is 36GB of used data on the disk, but I don't want to disrupt this thread, I just wanted to know if there has been some improvement in speed. I suppose the best way is to try it myself. Is there a d/l link available please.

 

Thanks Pete - that will be interesting but I don't want to sideline this thread.

 

Check page 27 of this thread for a link.

 

Definitely full backup. The Macrium compression is a bit more agressive than Active. 15,388MB v 16,591MB

 

Thanks Frog, that's good news to me. Sorry, I didn't mean to sound impatient.

 

MarkP Thank you also.

 

Thanks

 

Just tried a full backup of V6 on my system drive and it is marginally faster at 5' 22" but not enough to convince me to upgrade. Of course its selling point will be its backup options to others.