Macrium Reflect

@Cache The Recovery partition may have just been created if you installed a feature release like Windows 11 24H2. It’s not technically necessary, but Windows creates it during feature updates if it doesn’t exist, and it does have some uses even for people who regularly use Reflect, such as rolling back a specific Windows update if you don’t also want to roll back all other data on your Windows partition. You could technically delete it, but it may come back at the next feature update. But as noted, you should back up all of those partitions. My general guidance is to default to backing up all partitions on a Windows disk unless you have a specific reason for excluding anything, e.g. a data partition you created. If you default to backing up only what you think is essential and omit things you’re not sure about, then if you ever needed to restore onto a totally empty disk, you may need to do some extra work to get a bootable system.

@Dude Guyman The MSR partition is created on all disks initialized as GPT by Windows, not just disks that will host a Windows partition — although for data-only disks, the MSR partition is created at the very beginning of the disk as part of initializing said disk as GPT. In terms of Windows Recovery, you’re correct that without a Recovery partition, Windows will just keep the WinRE.wim file in the \Windows\System32\Recovery folder, but I don’t think it can actually be used for booting into WinRE while it’s stored there. I may be wrong on that, but at a minimum it would be less resilient if you ever had a file system issue that affected the entire Windows partition, for example. In terms of what it does, it gives you an environment that contains various troubleshooting/recovery tools, including Command Prompt, System Restore, System Image Restore, Update Rollback, Startup Repair, and some others. Granted, some of that wouldn’t be necessary for avid Reflect users.

 

Thanks for the assistance. Just to confirm that last week's update was only a security update and not a Feature one. I am deliberately keeping on W11 23H2 for the time being. Anyway it's good to know that everyone agrees that I should image all the partitons..

 

Checking in: been watching...
is "X" working for everybody?

As much as I resent the subscription plan: Considering options
Something else I saw but didnt quite understand :"need to be connected to internet to use Macruim X"

?

 

Yes, working perfectly for me, like Macrium always has.
Acadia

 

Reflect X periodically confirms the status of your subscription/activation, but there’s still a way to perform an offline activation for systems that are never connected to the Internet.

 

Post #11042 No! MBR disks + Reflex X + Restore (via rescue.iso) to empty/blanked disk = Fail 100%!

 

They few times I tried Reflect X I was unable to successfully restore an image. With version 8 I had no problems, but with X I had nothing but problems.

 

I installed MR X on my main system for the very first time 2 weeks ago. I have performed 5-6 restores during this time without any issues. The first two restore were done with an increment chain that was started by v8.1 and further incremented by MR X. They restored fine. But I have noticed no backup speed improvements over v8.1. In fact, MR X performs exactly the same as v8.1.

The only issue I have noticed is that when the backup sets switched to .mrimgx file format from .mrimg, my restores started taking twice as long to complete. I am not sure whether it is due to a difference between the two image file formats or whether my newer images had more data in them. I will keep on testing this to rule out any factor other than the change of image file format. Has anybody else noticed an increase in restore time with MR X compared to MR 8.1?

 

Hi Raza, I've also switched to Macrium X recently but I haven't performed a restore yet. All I can say is that backups are slightly faster with X compared to 8.1. What 8.1 did in 12 minutes X would do in 10. Why haven't I tried a restore yet, quite frankly I don't know, perhaps I take it for granted that it will be at least the same as 8.1. I'll do it as soon as possible and will report here the results.

 

I have just done some tests, but unfortunately I don’t have the figures for Macrium V8.1, I can only say approximately from memory. However I took the opportunity to compare restores from Macrium X and Hasleo. Everything went well and extremely fast.

The volume to backup/restore is 186 GB.

Macrium restored it in 3 minutes

Hasleo (surprise!) restored it in 2 minutes

With V8.1 I remember restoring volumes of 300 GB in about 5 minutes therefore times are virtually the same. There is another variable that should be taken into account, namely the number of clicks one has to do in order to go ahead with the restore. Macrium was interrupting more often than Hasleo. They are both very fast on my hardware, but the real surprise is Hasleo (the latest beta), 2 minutes restores are really impressive!

 

For anyone that doesn't know, Hasleo is amazing and FREE!

 

The amount of bugs that I see in Hasleo's thread are enough to scare me to not wanna use it. I cannot rely on such a program for full system backups. Macrium Reflect is 100% reliable and tested for years.

 

^^
This. My thoughts exactly.

 

+1

 

Apparently, many of the posters here have never used the Hasleo Backup Suite ... and have not been viewing the Macrium REFLECT product Forum, especially as Reflect X is concerned.

There is a lot to learn in both of those efforts...

 

Interesting. I've never encountered any HBS bugs that I consider to be anything close to a deal-breaker. In fact, it's been very stable for me.

 

@Osaban, thanks for the tests. I was comparing the speed improvements to the marketing for MR X that promised a 2x increase in speed for both backups and restores. I have not experienced anything like that. The live backups of MR X take approximately the same amount of time to complete as v8.1, and right now the restores are almost half the speed, about 2 minutes for v8.1 to about 4 minutes for MR X.

Other than that I have not experienced any issues with MR X.

I will keep on testing. It might be something else on my system that changed. I did upgrade to Win 11 24H2 at the same time, so the v8.1 speed benchmarks are pre-24H2, but I don't see why or how upgrading to 24H2 should effect MR restore speed.

 

I have a rule, I never change a software, that fulfills my requirements, until that software lets me down. I switched to Macrium in 2009-10 and since then in all this time Macrium has not let me down even once. I will only look elsewhere if Macrium starts to fail me on a consistent basis.

 

It is understood that loyalty to an excellent software like Macrium is due, I've used Macrium for years and restored hundreds of times without the slightest glitch. As a matter of fact Macrium remains my first imaging software, I will continue paying for it also as a form of support for the company, they deserve it. Lately I decided to have a second imaging software (Hasleo), it is free for now, and most importantly because computers are so fast nowadays (mine is) incremental backups last less than a minute, therefore backingup with different software is not only super secure but extremely fast. As for Hasleo having bugs, it's not my experience whatsoever. I mean it has restored 186 GB (100 GB as an image volume) in 2 minutes, I can only say wow!

 

Oh yeah, 8.1 is the best most reliable back up software. Never had a problem, only with X . Plus a yearly payment, that sucks.
8.1 .

 

But Macrium Reflect X has let a bunch of people down, hence the HBS recommendation.

 

People will hate me for saying this, but I agree, some things are just worth paying for. I also use Hasleo, Terabyte, and R-Drive Image, but Macrium is my "go to".

 

I read the issues here on this forum and this is the reason I did not install MR X on my main system until two weeks ago, but I have yet to encounter any issues myself. I have a UEFI based laptop with three internal drives running on Windows 11. I completely uninstalled v8.1 before installing MR X. Since it is still in testing phase, I have been using MR X extensively to trigger an issue of any kind, but so far it has been performing flawlessly.

In fact, MR X seems to be the same as MR v8.1, they just open sourced the image format (useless to me), added support for resumable images (I am not going to need this ever), support for ARM based Windows (I am not sure I will upgrade to an ARM machine), enhanced backup filtering (I only need the defaults, nothing else) and 2x speed increase (which I did not experience). So for me MR X is just v8.1 with extra features, I am not sure how can there be any issues.

 

One thing I noticed with MR-X vs MR-8.1.x. With BIOS/MBR disks that fail to boot after a restore, there is a little check box, upper left of the restore dialog, about "Legacy XP boot" (from memory) that is checked by default, or unchecked? I forget, but it's the opposite of MR-8. That may be the cause of the MBR restore failure? When I toggled the check box to test, it rearranged the partitions in the 'restore to' area, leaving extra space at the beginning, or end, etc. so I abandoned that idea. Memory is fuzzy, but that toggle is different and probably a problem.

 

I did some more testing on why the restore time with MR X was taking twice as long as compared to v8.1, and the culprit seems to be the recovery media. I rebuilt the recovery media from scratch, and this seems to have corrected the speed issue. Now the restore time of MR X is in line with v8.1. So please ignore my earlier complaint about the restore time of MR X.