Macrium Reflect

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

  1. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Ok, I get it now. In that case I would do the following:
    • Make an image backup of the old system with its 240 GB disk. Call it “Old system image”. Don’t bother tweaking it beforehand.
    • Do the same for the new system with its 120 GB disk. Call it “New system image”.
    • Create Rescue Media and confirm that it boots on both systems and can detect the internal disks on both systems.
    • Physically swap the disks between systems.
    • Boot the new system with its transplanted 240 GB disk and restore “New system image” onto it. To do that in a way that if fills the additional space, click the Copy Partitions button on the first step of the wizard and choose the “Resize” option underneath that button. Run the restore.
    • Do the same for the old system with its transplanted 120 GB disk using “Old system image”. This time, the Resize option should shrink the Windows partition accordingly.
    • Test boot both systems. If they both work, great. If not, start by running Fix Boot Problems. Make sure that you boot the Rescue Media in UEFI mode on the new system that has a Windows environment designed to be booted in UEFI mode.
    You won’t need to muck with MBR/GPT conversions in your scenario, and you can do all of this with Reflect Free. Although just fyi you wouldn’t have to “burn” a license for a paid release anyway. You could just temporarily activate one of your keys on that system and then remove the license afterward.
     
  2. XIII

    XIII Registered Member

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    This seems to match what I had in mind, with additional tips. Thanks!

    I do need to make sure that the 240 GB disk contains at most 120 GB of files before starting though, right? (but not change the partition size)
     
  3. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Yes. Technically you'd have to come in slightly under that because there will likely be one or more other hidden partitions on the disk. Reflect will not automatically resize "system" partitions other than the Windows partition, e.g. it wouldn't resize the EFI, MSR, and WinRE partitions. Those will be carried over maintaining their current sizes. So the smaller disk will need to have enough capacity to store those partitions and THEN an additional partition large enough to accommodate whatever you're actually storing in your Windows partition. If not, I'd start with the Disk Cleanup app. Make sure you click the button to clean up system files. If that doesn't get you there either, then I've often used TreeSize Free to map out where storage on a folder or volume is being consumed. It sort root folders in descending order by size, and as you drill into folders it sorts the subfolders and files the same way, so it makes it becomes clear very quickly where your storage is being consumed.
     
  4. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    One additional note: The automatic resize functionality I'm talking about is new for Reflect V8. But you asked about using Reflect Free, and for now, Reflect V8 Free has not officially launched. Resizing is possible with V7, but it involves a bit more manual effort. So you may want to either use a Reflect V8 trial or else do everything using Reflect V8 Rescue Media, which can be used to create backups. Or if you want to use V7, the resize process is shown as Steps 4 and 5 of this KB article. The article addresses cloning, but that interface looks and works the same for image restores except the item is called "Restored Partition Properties" instead of "Cloned Partition Properties".
     
  5. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    I had a hiccup on my main system with some drive letters being changed.
    As a consequence my main GFS backup via Macrium going back to February has now yesterday's differential and this morning's incremental on a different drive / folder from the chain. Obviously that is bad - can I fix this either by moving the two files into the
    correct folder or after "resetting the drive letter in the schedule " rerunning macrium? I think the incremental does not matter so much as it would be replaced by a new run but I am concerned about the weekly differential now missing in the chain.
     
  6. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    It's not completely clear what backups you've got where at this point and which one is the "correct" location, but when Reflect creates a Differential or Incremental at a given location, it is appended to some other backup in that same location. The only exception I'm aware of is that if you're running a backup interactively (non-scheduled) and run out of space, Reflect will prompt you for whether you want to continue on another target, in which case you can end up with related backups on different drives. But apart from that case, Reflect doesn't create dependencies within a backup set across different locations, which is one of my favorite features since it's great for disk rotation strategies. But it also means that there would be no benefit to combining Differentials and Incrementals that are currently in different folders into the same folder now. They won't be related to each other. I would suggest manually running whatever backup(s) are necessary to get yourself back on track.
     
    Last edited: Jul 14, 2021
  7. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    Thank you Jphughan - it was the issue of the dependencies that I was not clear on. I did run the differential now and that should be fine. While the issue with the changed drive letters this time was a special case, I noticed yesterday that swapping drives or just removing external drives for a short period of time and then connecting them again, you always run the risk of drive letters being allocated differently (or I guess in sequence). Having my Macrium GFS backup running on auto-pilot that is a bit of an issue I never
    considered before.
     
  8. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    I suggest plugging your external USB HD in and changing the drive letter to something towards the end of the alphabet. Say W:
    Then it should always be W: when you plug it in.
     
  9. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    I was going to say this too. Relying on the Windows “next available” drive letter assignment is always a hazard for scenarios like this. But if you manually assign your external drive a letter, Windows will remember that for that drive and keep using that letter for it going forward. HOWEVER, Windows will not “reserve” that letter, meaning that it will still assign that letter to something ELSE if that letter is the next available letter and your “special” drive isn’t connected at the time. And if that letter ever gets used for something else, then Windows will no longer remember to assign that letter to your “special” drive afterward. That’s why picking a letter far down in the alphabet works so well. Windows will remember that assignment going forward, and the letter being far down in the alphabet means that it’s very unlikely to ever get automatically assigned to something else by being the next available letter, so the assignment memory is unlikely to be erased.

    Or you can switch Reflect to performing destination discovery by volume unique ID rather than drive letter. There are pros and cons to that.
     
  10. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    Yes, I will do that - if you have two external drives that you normally have plugged in and allocate these as W and X and from time to time unplug these as you need to connect a different stick temporarily, then the temporary stick or drive will get the next
    available letter (E or F) but your "regular backup drive) being connected afterwards will again consistently be W or X irrespective of which one you plug in first (ie keep their specific drive letter)?
     
  11. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Correct
     
  12. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    excellent and thanks for clearing this up for me
     
  13. jimminy

    jimminy Registered Member

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    I wonder if there are any pitfalls to having several external drives, each assigned the same letter, say W, if they are only used one at a time?
    Example would be two backup drives which are rotated, but never used at the same time?
     
  14. aldist

    aldist Registered Member

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    @beethoven
    Assign a permanent letter to the removable storage device using the command file from the administrator:
    ...mountvol W: - desired letter, preferably from the end of the alphabet. Save the command file with the name W.bat and place it in the root of the flash drive or partition of the mobile drive. The first time you connect the stick to the computer, the stick will get a different letter, run the command file from the admin and the stick will get the letter W. Reconnecting the stick will not be necessary. During the next connections to this computer the USB drive will always receive letter W.
    The letter can also be assigned (changed) when the flash drive is connected in the WinPE environment.
    For fixing letters, icons and other manipulations with removable media the USBDLM is very good.
    There are no pitfalls. If the first disk is connected, when you connect the second disk, the second disk will get a different letter.
     
  15. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    interesting and thank you
     
  16. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    aldist,

    Nice batch file. Thanks.
     
  17. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    That wouldn't work. Like I said above, if you manually assign W to a disk, and then W is then ever used for any other disk whether automatically or by you manually assigning it, Windows will forget about the special W assignment for the first disk. If you want to have multiple disks that won't be connected simultaneously and want all of them to be assigned the same drive letter whenever they're connected, then you'd have to use other means. I use a utility for this exact scenario called USB Drive Letter Manager, which despite the name works on more than USB devices and can do more than manage drive letters. Even within drive letter management, it can handle that in a variety of ways, but I have it configured so that whenever a USB disk is connected, the volumes are checked for an INI file at a specific path, and if that file is found, USBDLM will assign that volume the drive letter specified within that INI file. And all of the disks in my client's backup rotation have an identical copy of that INI file at that path. If more than one of those disks is ever connected at the same time, the first disk gets the desired assignment and USBDLM falls back to default drive letter assignments for subsequent disks. But unlike Windows, the next time those disks are seen individually, it sticks to the desired drive letter specified in the INI file.
     
  18. Krusty

    Krusty Registered Member

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    I just got prompted to update
     
  19. aldist

    aldist Registered Member

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    Dear Developer! v8.0.6036 Error detected!
    1\ The "Image Details" tooltip has different font size in Existing Backups > View As: Backup Sets and View As: Backup Files.
    2\ When booting into WinPE and selecting Existing Backups > View As: Backup Sets (not Backup Files), "Image Details" tooltip does not appear.
     
  20. XIII

    XIII Registered Member

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    Worked like a charm! Did not even have to apply any boot fixes on either disk/laptop.

    However, once done I noticed that the new laptop contained two recovery partitions (old/unused 500 MB at the start and new >500 MB at the end). This probably was the result of me updating Windows 10 from a really old build to 21H1. However, since I had a Reflect image to restore in case things went wrong (and restore took only 2 minutes!) I felt safe tinkering with that. Using diskpart and some freeware partition tools I was able to delete the first recovery partition (and delete and recreate a MSR partition, since you can apparently not move this) and ended up with a proper layout: EFI partition, MSR, Boot/C, Recovery.

    Happy Reflect user once again!
     
  21. Krusty

    Krusty Registered Member

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    I don't why I have been prompted to update to the same version again. o_O

    Edit: Err, I just remembered I restored an image from last week, so I probably had the old version installed.
     
    Last edited: Jul 18, 2021
  22. Brian K

    Brian K Imaging Specialist

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    XIII,

    Third party partitioning apps can Slide (Move) the MSR.
     
  23. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    Just as a follow up and an observation I made just now: I had a number of rescue sticks and wanted to test these to ensure they still reboot without issues and the good news is they all did. I noticed however that for the Terabyte rescue sticks the drive letter shown in the rescue environment for the image source had reverted to the early drive letter (E, F) whereas the macrium sticks had kept the new drive letters T and K. In this case it's not a big deal as if I am in the situation to run a restore, I will make
    very sure that I am looking at the correct image, just thought it was interesting.
     
  24. jphughan

    jphughan Registered Member

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    Normally there is no mechanism to achieve drive letter assignment consistency between full Windows and any Windows PE environment. You might see some consistency simply due to the "next available" assignment logic as Windows works through partitions in sequential order, but that definitely wouldn't apply to manually assigned letters from farther down the alphabet. However, Reflect's Rescue Media Builder actually does embed some drive letter assignment information from full Windows into the Rescue Media builds it creates, specifically to try to achieve that consistency. It's not perfect -- my recollection is that locked BitLocker partitions don't get assigned the correct drive letter -- but it's definitely better than nothing. So if you created new Rescue Media builds since changing your drive letters, that's probably why the Reflect Rescue Media used your new letters.
     
  25. beethoven

    beethoven Registered Member

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    hmm. I have only just now done a new updated rescue stick for Macrium after having tested my old sticks. So somehow the new drive letters were detected by macrium irrespective of the creation date of the older rescue media. It really does not
    matter much to me in this case, I was just curious. I am glad to have solved the issue with the connected drives for my scheduled backups - for these obviously it's important that these don't shift when you have chains of backups.
     
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