I specify, of course, on Windows 7 you can get only the black boot menu, and on Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 any versions - both black or blue. v1809 I indicated as the latest version of Windows 10. Once again, it works on any versions of Windows 10. I myself love the black menu, and it loads faster than the blue one.
Has anybody experienced high disk writes to the C drive when using Macrium? I noticed the other day that my new SSD had ~5Tb of writes to it in ~75 days, or about 66gb per day. My old one had about 6gb written to it per day. I monitored it with Process Hacker and it was consistently having 1gb written to it every 10 minutes (somewhat less if I closed Chrome, which seems to write ~1gb per hour all by itself). Apparently it's Reflect. I tried disabling CBT, Image Guardian, the startup UI Watcher entry, and the Macrium Service, but the disk writes only went back down when I uninstalled it.
On my W10 (v1803) System, most of the WRITE bandwidth is being consumed by task "System" on behalf of Malwarebytes, file downloads and some housekeeping by my File Replication software... none of it is being done by any REFLECT tasks or by System on behalf of any managed REFLECT files. This was determined by using the System Resource Monitor. That sounds like a serious issue for your configuration... I would take it up on the Macrium Forums or directly with <Support@Macrium.com>.
Yes, I'll do that. I suppose I don't know that it's Reflect itself that's the problem - maybe something else is trying to scan it or something.
This weekend Macrium Reflect failed to backup a partition. Worse: it corrupted both the source and the backup partition. I was very lucky that I could recover the source partition with chkdsk (otherwise I would need to run a lengthy restore from my online backup), but the full backup of this 256 GB partition took quite long (almost 2 hours, from internal SATA hard drive to internal SATA hard drive). Backups have been extremely slow for weeks now and Macrium support says they cannot help me (a paying customer). I'm afraid I have to look for alternatives... What would you experts suggest? One one PC I want to image an SSD (full) and clone some HD partitions. On the other PC I want to image an SSD (full) and a HD (incremental).
Is it possible that the disk was already corrupted and the backup merely mirrored that? Not sure why any backup software would need to alter the source disk? Macrium takes roughly 2hrs to backup & verify c600Gb over multiple partitions for me and the PC is a few years old so isn't particualrly fast. Was backup image verified? Macrium is the only software that hasn't given me grief on restore and I've tried a few of the most popular ~ AOMEI, EaseUS, O&O & Acronis.
I would probably consider testing the hard drive, because you could have a drive failing. Slow access is one symptom. Drives sometimes fail gradually. Have you run the vendor supplied diagnostics and checked the S.M.A.R.T. data? Disk Checkup is a handy free 3rd party tool to check all brands of drives with. https://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm Data corruption can also be a symptom of bad RAM. I would also run the free Memtest86 memory diagnostic to check for that. https://www.memtest86.com/ IMHO I cannot see how Macrium could possibly corrupt a source partition. It only reads from it.
I agree that it's weird (and probably a coincidence), since the last file I saved to that partition was fine on Friday evening (a MP3 that I played multiple times). I think Reflect even checks a disk before starting the backup. Still it stopped with a read error. And after that Windows complained that the partition was not formatted and refused to open it. The partition table was still OK according to TestDisk, but both TestDisk and Windows itself could not access the partition. Luckily a "chkdsk /scan /F" run in a Command Prompt as Administrator restored the filesystem. This was probably bad luck (or a dying drive indeed; this PC over 10 years old... I hope it survives until Apple releases new iMacs). The terribly slow speed issue happens on two completely different systems though. Today's example for the other PC (about 1 year old): creating a full image of the SSD (about 64 GB I think) took less than 20 minutes, but creating a 10 GB incremental image (no consolidation) of the HD took 2 hours and 20 minutes! PS: Thank you for pointing out the tools; I have run Memtest86 before and the last surface check of the drive showed no errors, but I might need to check this again!
On the Options page, always select Faster Changes Only Backups. Do this when creating Full or Changes Only backups. This will cover you for Incremental Changes Only backups. If you omit to select Faster Changes Only Backups, the backup time for Changes Only backups can be increased by three fold.
I've never had a problem with Macrium. But I always do full image backups, so cannot speak for incremental or differential. The Windows built-in image tool is a reliable alternative. I mainly stopped using it because I wanted to automate the process, but it's fine for a one-off image. You also don't get the image file compression that Macrium provides, so the image files are larger.
Is someone watching this? After restoring from the image, all system tray icons, except the "network" and "volume" icons, are hidden. For restore I use backup this registry hiew HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify
I'm confused. You said you restored an image, but then you say that for the restore you used a backup of a particular registry key (a hive is the entire contents of the top-level path, like HKCU). If you restored an image you shouldn't have needed to separately restore a registry backup. Or did you just extract that from an image rather than restoring the image?
Reflect verifies the file system before capturing an image backup, which is basically a regular CHKDSK. It does not modify the source even if it finds an error, and it also doesn't perform a full surface scan the way CHKDSK /R would. I agree with others that your drive may be failing anyway. And while it's possible that other applications may work differently under this condition simply due to differences in error handling and how "persistent" they are on things like retries when they encounter errors, obviously that wouldn't be addressing the underlying problem. But if you've already got a good recent backup, I suppose it's worth a test.
I had the same problem on an older version, version 6.something I think. Never figured out what caused it. It went away when I went to version 7, which was coincidental with a fresh install of W10, so I'm no help at all with your situation.
1. I restored from image. 2. Then I restored this key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\Local Settings\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\TrayNotify not all HKCU, but only .....\TrayNotify. It seems to me that this started on Win10 v1809. I can, of course, manually drag the shortcuts, but I wanted to find a quick way to restore.
Yes, I'm curious anyway... Besides: this might explain the slowness on the 10 years old PC, but not on the 1 years old PC.
I have very little experience with backup and restore software; I recently downloaded and installed Macrium Reflect Free. My first question, since my Laptop is 1 terabyte do I need an external drive of the same size to safely make backups? I believe I heard that if a backup of a small drive was restored to a large drive the large drive would then reflect the smaller size and to correct this you would need to resize the partion. My second question, does a full image backup include the Windows Operating system? My last question, what is the difference between a full image and partition backup? Sorry for my ignorance, as always I appreciate all replies and I would thank you in advance. John
no, images (aka snapshots in Macrium) are compressed so smaller size. Yes full image is the whole drive, partition are just partitions.
I've been avoiding Win10 1809 because it was initially plagued with problems and doesn't offer anything I want (except Clipboard History, which I admit is pretty cool), and I keep all of my system tray icons always shown, so I'm not sure what to tell you on this one. Sorry! Out of curiosity though, why did you restore that key after restoring the backup? Did you have a newer batch of system tray icon preferences than your backup?
1. As others have said, image backups are compressed, so you won't necessarily need a target whose capacity matches your source, or even the capacity you're consuming on the source. However, if you want to retain more than one backup so that you can roll back to multiple points in time and/or protect against possible corruption of a given backup file/set, you'll obviously need more capacity to store the additional backups. It's not uncommon for backup destinations to have significantly MORE capacity than the source for that exact reason. 2. Yes, Reflect defaults to restoring partitions at their original size, even if that leaves unused space on the larger destination. You can however specify that partitions should be resized as part of the restore process itself rather than doing it after the fact, and that is actually preferable because the only partition that can easily be extended afterward is the last one on the disk, and in some cases that might be a recovery partition of some sort, not your main Windows partition. This KB article, specifically Steps 4 and 5, covers how to perform a restore in a way that allows you to specify different partition sizes and/or locations while "staging" the restore rather than doing it afterward. The KB pertains to cloning a disk, but an image restore scenario works the same way except that the option will be called "Restored Partition Properties" rather than "Cloned Partition Properties". 3. A "full image" can mean one of two things -- an image of your entire disk, or a Full backup as opposed to an Incremental or Differential. Those are completely different concepts. The differences between Full, Differential, and Incremental backups is a longer discussion (and well documented in Reflect's online user guide, which is itself much better than average documentation). But if you're asking about a full disk image vs a partition image, in general you want a full disk image of whatever disk has Windows installed in order to ensure you can get a bootable system after restoring. If you manually created separate partitions for data, you may or may not want to include those, but that's not as common. If you open Reflect and look under the Backup Tasks heading in the upper-left corner, you will find a very helpful option called "Create an image of the partition(s) required to back up and restore Windows". If you click that, the wizard that appears will have the appropriate partitions pre-selected. That should be considered your "minimum viable backup" for any backup you want to use for system restore purposes. You can of course add to it if you want (e.g. some systems come with factory image restore partitions that aren't necessary for Windows but that you might want to keep), but you shouldn't subtract any. Lastly, if you're new to Reflect and image solutions in general, I would really recommend perusing the online user guide, which can be downloaded as a PDF. Macrium's documentation is better than most, and backups are obviously crucial, so it's worth taking the time to familiarize yourself with terminology, application capabilities, best practices, and options in order to figure out what setup is most appropriate for your needs and what you can do. You generally don't want to wait until crisis strikes to learn how to use this application, especially because by then you may have made a decision that is fatal to your restore prospects and can't be fixed at that point. Obviously people here can help too, but sometimes you won't even know what questions you should be asking until you've read up a bit, and not everything that's important will always be discovered organically. As just one thing to do upfront, test your Rescue Media. Make sure you know how to boot your system from it, that it loads properly, and that you know how to have it access your backups in case you ever need to restore your system that way.
