A stupid question about macrium reflect free

Hi,Recently,installed program,and created first rescue disc,and image,and was wondering,what is the difference between using the,image restore tab, and using the rescue disc?Would have asked on their forum but,it's only for paid user's.Thanks for any help.

 

Well, there's always Google.

http://kb.macrium.com/KnowledgebaseArticle50079.aspx

In the case of system images i.e. the 'C drive' containing the operating system files, it is not possible to restore files in real time because they are in use by the current session of the operating system. In order to get around this problem, Macrium uses Windows PE, a cut down version of Windows which is booted.

 

Well i only use the macrium rescue disk to image and restore.I do not have macrium free installed and i dont use the WAIK which is a convoluted bloat which i dont want.

I have restored over a dozen or so images this way with no problems at all.

 

To answer your question, there is no difference really if you end goal is to restore an image to the system partition. One method will use a linux live cd the other will use PE.

The difference between the two rescue environments though is something else. The linux live cd does only one thing - restore an image. It does include network capability but thats about it.

The PE method on the other hand gives you a mini-windows environment. You could, depending on the PE, move files from the system drive prior to restoring, or use some AV's. The point is that a PE is "normally" going to give you an environment where you do things "other" than restore an image.

You could also do this with linux as well if you wanted to use a different live cd distro. I've never done this. In PE, all you need is a copy of the macrium PE files and they can be located anywhere. You boot into a PE, you locate the macrium restore application and execute it. Linux may well work the same way.

If you want to simply restore, use what macrium has available, either linux cd or PE. If you want to do more, get a different PE. You can even use BartPE with macrium restore if you want, no WAIK needed.

Sul.