That's what my own results have been too. I was curious if it's the norm or not but i suppose that it is. In times before i would just wing it and bypass verify to save myself some time
That's what I do. A successful verification after the backup was completed, or even a manual verify at any point thereafter, is no guarantee that the backup will still be intact whenever you want to actually restore something out of it. The point has been made that a post-backup verify can alert you to a current issue with your hardware, such as a bad USB port/cable or bad memory module, both of which have been known to cause verification failures, but I don't manually verify any other files I create or copy, and I use a rotation of disks, so that doesn't really concern me. In Macrium's own KB article, they estimate that fewer than 1 in 1,000 systems will experience a verification failure. That all might be why the option is disabled by default. But it's also worth reiterating the point made above, which is that a verification just makes sure that the data in the backup file hasn't changed since it was originally written, which is accomplished by recalculating checksums during the verify operation and comparing those results to the checksums that were originally written to the file. The verify option does NOT recheck the data in the backup against the original source.
Reasonable- I make backup images of a same disk-Full Backup- and/or an Incremental with (2) reliable backup programs MR being one and also with Drive Snapshot (non incremental capable). Recently during backups i threw in the Verify Routine but found it time consuming maybe needlessly so. At any rate with triple current Full backups per system it's a drop back measure i employ just in the event one of those run aloof- which so far for a very long time i hadn't run in to thankfully.
I was reading this discussion and was about to jump in with this exact point that you mentioned. Image verification just checks the integrity of the image file since it was created, nothing else. If you are confident that your images have not been tempered with or if you are confident that the hard drive the image files are being written to does not have bad sectors (very rare nowadays), then you do not need to verify your images after creation. Enabling Marcium Image Guardian prevents your image files from being tempered with and Windows 10 is very good at automatically alerting you if there are errors on your hard drive. You can also run checkdisk manually but there is no need nowadays. This is why I have never verified any image created by Macrium and I have not had a single failure as of yet. Been using Macrium since 2008 and typically do at least 1-2 restores/week of my C drive. This is also why I at least consider image verification a waste of time, but I have nothing against anyone who verifies images for their own peace of mind.
While we are on the subject here, i just did a google search for best image programs 2022 and Macrium isn't even mentioned in any of them like PC World, TechJury, TechRadar, and on PCMag arcserve ShadowProtect was their top place pick. They seem to favor image programs such as EaseUS, Acronis, Paragon, etc ZDNet does have Macrium #1 on their list but that one may be dated because their website refuses to show any date on the page unlike the others which are basically dated August 2022. I suppose that's really just advertisement with a few hand picked revenue supported choices. TechAdvisor seats of all things Ashampoo Backup Pro 16-
I think you nailed it right there. Most if not all of these review websites have some sort of financial agreement for monetary compensation with the vendors whose items they review. This is one of their revenue models. Usually the vendors that pay more get their products to stay on top of the review lists. I am assuming none of the above websites could reach an agreement with Macrium. This is one of the reason I come here to Wilders forum to find out about software instead of going to these websites. In fact, it was from here that I actually found out about Macrium way back in 2008.
It is pretty obvious and has been for some time. Macrium just plain works and works very well here. And although i really don't use the scheduler, should that come into play at some point i expect it will perform as well. Normally i prefer doing just a few incremental updates manually per tour when rotating systems after updating and/or adding programs so they get in on the full image as well. It's always been top notch whenever restoring. The same can be said for Drive Snapshot on my rigs. MR has additional useful features should i decide to run those which makes it an ideal Backup/Restore Solution.
Reflect has worked very well for me since 2017. Up to that point I had been using the built-in Windows 7 Backup and Restore to create my images. So I had looked around for an imaging utility with a scheduler and automatic retention/deletion when I got tired of doing it all manually. Macrium just clicked the best for me. Now I have the scheduler run a daily full image every night, perfect peace of mind! Keeps several of the newest images, and deletes the oldest one, as much as I can fit on the target drive. Have never messed with incremental or differential images, as a full image only takes about 35-40 minutes here. But once a month I still use Win 7 image manually in order to have an image file in ".vhd" format on hand, just in case...
Yes that Macrium backup/restore System on the whole with those features (retention, scheduler etc) is a very comprehensive dependable package set. I just became so use over time to manually running backups and such that the scheduling didn't catch on with me until taking time to really determine a best approach for that. Something i do hope to implement and put in use soon. @TheRollbackFrog + @Brian K and others also have been and continue to be marvels in their expertise, sharing their expertise and troubleshooting Macrium concerns and other backup programs of interest. I like incremental's anymore and have long studied other's usage of them on this forum. Use to be i did the same as yourself on simply doing Full Backups Only but lately i been running those (manually at first) and at some point i intend to use the automated incremental feature on it's own per personal preference.
There are tons of good vibes using Incrementals and only a few <gulp!> worries. The best vibe is maintaining a small backup image chain using regularly scheduled INCs. Since my System integrity is important to me, I also use Intra-Daily scheduled Incremental feature at 1-hr intervals and they are automatically cleaned up after 7-days of retention. Since Reflect uses its Rapid Delta Restore (RDR) feature (since 2015... only restores the differences between the on-disk image and the Incremental image selected, very fast), I also use Reflect as my PRIMARY System "snapshot" tool (an ol' RollbackRX user, I was, I was)... which is only slightly slower than Rollback RX itself. This I use along with Shadow Defender when testing software or engaging in other nefarious Infobahn activities. The entire Reflect System has been excellent for me since 2015 as far as System image mgmt is concerned as well as snapshotting capability. My backup imaging utility is Terabyte's Drive Image Backup & Restore Suite (the ol' Image For Windows) which is not as full a suite of tools as Macrium Reflect but does contain its own RDR type of feature. Neither has ever failed me in their use over many, many years.
Seems to me a lot 35-40 minutes unless you have a big drive to backup. It takes 10 minutes for my system to create a full backup for 120 GB of stuff, and 90 seconds for incremental images if there aren't significant changes. I don't use the scheduler as I don't keep any drive plugged in my laptop. I'm also very happy with MR, no restore failures whatsoever. Many years ago I used StorageCraft ShadowProtect also very fast and reliable but too expensive...
My incrementals are swift to complete images as well i just learned. And that was with these drives - (WD Green 120 SSD/WD 320 HDD + Seagate 500 also platter driven) with approximately 1/3 used space each or less- Just sent off and expecting next week 'another' Toshiba 1Terabyte external drive since i used ample/triple backups each. As mentioned above and with the onset of Fall coming, this is a normal routine to begin concentrating on all my Windows 8.1 storage backups (in event of hardware bork) - Also included was one single 120Gb Solid State Dell Windows 10 backup. They all fit with room to spare on the 1 TeraByte Toshiba External. Toshiba has really seemed sufficient for me for backup storage offline and safety keep. As trends would have it, (and they do have their way with these machines) i am also beginning to ever so slowly to try to transition to more Windows 10 maybe 11 units. But for the time being, and since this summer after tweaking/customizing and update + securing ALL of my spectacular performing 8.1 systems- (Each also with a final Custom Refresh.WIM Backup), i hope to finish it up soon. I simply ran out of External Storage space due to the making 3 different backups of each Hard Drive.
Not when I'm sleeping at night, LOL! But the average size is ~200 GB used on a 500 GB SSD, backed up to a WD Passport USB spinner.
I always wonder how users can achieve this. For me a full backup of a hard disk where 160 - 180 MB are used takes every time about 75 minutes. But I do not blame Macrium for this. Before I had used "Paragon Backup & Recovery" and there were similar long (or even longer) times. I assume it has to do with my quite old computer. The images themselves are o.k. and the time is no big problem. But I admit that I would create more often an image if it could be done e.g. in 15 or 20 minutes.
The backup time depends on your hardware, amount of data in the partition being backed up, backup compression and chosen imaging app. I prefer separating my personal data files from my OS files so my OS has "minimal" data files. I don't have ten copies of Rambo in my OS partition. I have an OS and a data partition. Hardware. I do NVMe to NVMe backups. A Full backup of MSR, ESP, Win11 and RE partitions takes 17 seconds. Backup size is 20 GB. A daily backup of the Data partition (400 GB of files) with Robocopy takes one minute. A differential image done immediately after a full backup takes 12 seconds. Image size 400 kb. Small as expected.
That's exceptional process times for backup images yet it makes sense in that your preferred method pulls away as you say data Partition from System and the end result is a more fluid -and time saving technique- I wager your restores while not on par for obvious reasons, still restore at also a much reduced time compared to lumping a full backup with both all on a single drive/partition. Yours is a tested and reliable preferred choice that @Peter2150 use to share of his own short duration progress with backups/restores. It's really informative good reading still resting in this same Macrium topic i believe-worth revisiting to encourage duplicating those time saving results
That's correct. If I have an OS issue I don't have to restore 400 GB of data files. A restore of the needed OS partitions takes 16 seconds.
That's time saving progression at it's best - My new Toshiba 1 terabyte External Drive is due arrival tomorrow. I have (2) 1 Terabyte each Mechanical HDD's (Seagate) housing Windows 8.1 in tip top shape i want to image. One is pretty full only 250Gb free space left and the other 500gb free that i expect i can fit at least (1) single backup each- If there's additional room i'll be sure to do another image but could be a stretch. Main thing is getting those drives backed up since there are none.
Wrapped up backing up 5 hard disk drives of beautiful Windows 8.1 (one is Pro). When dealing with older system as 8.1 and especially mechanized platter/spindle HDD's i discovered a few things. Macrium is as always efficient and still trouble free-at least to backing up- Restore tests later sometime. The thing i admire with Drive Snapshot, at least is as to do with nearly obsolete HDD's is that their GUI remains plain jane (grey) which for my purposes makes a backup faster without all the bells and whistles of a fashionable GUI (like Aomei Backupper) more geared to Windows 10 and onwards. I get that. Although Aomei is quite efficient i noticed it slower on (my) these older hardware drives (quicker on my sole Windows 10 with a NVMe SSD however) Aomei Backupper out of these 3 particular backup image program choices really heated my External Drive (and i do mean concerning HOT) which caught me by surprise. Mind you these were HOT backups with Windows running and even a video player in use during the entire live windows backup which might explain the heating. I simply can't be sure but took notice and next time i will instead use the PE Boot routine to conduct those backups with only Aomei. Macrium AND Drive Snapshot exhibited no heating whatsoever with the external drive like Backupper. Next External Drive that i order will be reserved strictly for IFW. (these current images are storaged as much as i dare do) I prefer to allot reasonable breathing space room.
The Rescue Media Creator has an option to create an ISO file. What is that used for? How is it different than creating a rescue flash drive?
I'll take a grab at that and say it's designed for Macrium User's some who still prefer and/or can make do with a DVD pe boot disk which when you think about it, countless many machines still in use (for home users anyway) was equipped with them. I for one happen to have an Aomei Partition Assistant silver plastic DVD Disc and it came in very handy on one of my 8.1 rigs when a pair of USB ports would throw out that "device not recognized error" so many Windows users have run across before at one time or another. With Macrium R, one could (if the machine is at all DVD Player equipped) could backup and restore their system using that medium after burning the ISO to it.
I use that capability because I find it handy to store entire Rescue Media builds in a single container file. That way I can use the ISO file to create a Rescue Media flash drive on demand later (using a utility like Rufus or via the appropriate manual commands) rather than having to keep a built flash drive handy all the time. As long as you have a secondary PC to perform the on-demand build in case your main PC is dead at that point, no worries. Another use case for ISO files is storing “known good” Rescue Media builds. That way if you update to a new Reflect release that contains a bug that breaks Rescue Media, which has happened, you can just use that ISO to roll back any flash drives you already updated with the buggy release. Yes, you could just roll back your entire system to undo the Reflect update if you have a suitable Reflect backup, or you could uninstall Reflect and reinstall an older version if you have an older Reflect installer, but the former option might roll back some things you don’t want to roll back, and the latter option requires you to have an installer for the pre-update release, which you aren’t likely to have if you primarily update Reflect using the updater rather than the download agent. ISO files are also useful if you need to boot a VM into the Rescue Media environment.
With iso you can always create a bootable flash drive or bootable CD without Macrium Reflect installed. I use iso`s to create multi-boot rescue flash drive containing for example Macrium v7, Macrium v8, Paragon Hard Disk Manager, Passcape Reset Windows Password, Acronis True Image, Windows 10PE, AOMEI Partition Assistant etc.
What they said above but also you can use such iso file to create a multi-boot drive using Ventoy https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
My laptop has Windows 10 Home and Macrium Home V8 (paid version). I restored a recent image and had to enter my BitLocker Recovery Key before the system would restart. This never happened before. Fortunately, I had the recovery key. After entering it the system started normally. I suspect it may be related to an August Windows Update for Secure Boot (KB5012170). My question is do I need to rebuild my recovery media or do anything else with Macrium? I’m not sure what the implications of having to enter my BitLocker Recovery Key are with respect to the Macrium software or any images I have.
