Don't be afraid to delete the 2gB incremental (and now the 348mB inc)... when you run the next manual it will increment off your baseline and get all the changes again. I wanted you to do that so you could watch the 2gB incremental in progress through your performance monitor. If you <right-click> your TaskBar and select Taskmgr, <click> on the "Performance" TAB and <click> on "Resource Monitor" at the bottom. This will bring up the ability to watch what tasks and at what rate they're using the disk. You can use the column headers to SORT to the way you wanna look at it... sort it so the largest "Total (B/sec)" task is at the top of the Activity window. This way you can see the rate of disk I/O on your system.
When running any (except scheduled) image process, the window on your screen should show you performance for each step of the operation. How did you run your manual?
I installed V6 and did a full backup. I don't leave my external HD running 24/7, I have been turning it on to do backups when ever since forever. If I don't keep it running will it screw up the incremental process, or will MR do it when I plug the HD in. I didn't set up a schedule. Thanks in advance.
If you didn't set up a schedule, there will be no INCREMENTAL to do. What is it that you think MR is supposed to be doing for you (you must have selected something)?
I did not see anything to indicate what was going on. I went to the scheduled task and selected the incremental, then clicked on run now.
Am running the incremental as suggested and am attaching a capture of the monitor. It seems to be pretty stable in this configuration
So I guess what happening is MR is reading the entire baseline to see what has changed and I guess it will have to do this for each incremental and differential it creates. So if this is correct I can expect each daily incremental and each weekly incremental to take about 35 min,,,,,is this correct? You say its an anomaly Froggie but thats what it seems to want to do.
What it does is read the current file structure (not the files) of your live system, then compares it against the file structure of the last image taken... that's how it determines the differences it needs for the incremental. Since above you mentioned your external storage device was on a USB2 port, the 2nd operation above will take a li'l longer but not that long. Once it determines the difference, it then grabs those content differences and starts writing them to the external device... these are the 3-operations it performs during the incremental and all have progress bars while the process is going on (so you can see them). The way to run a MANUAL task is not use the scheduler, just select the DEF file specs you want to run (the same used for the scheduled ops), use the "Run" toolbar item, select the op you wanna do (or prompt if you want to add a comment) then go. The progress window will pop up and you can watch those steps occur (descriptions are on the screen for each part of the operation. From your resource monitor pic above, your external device, M, is running very very slow (149kB/sec... should be around 25mB/sec) for even a USB2 device... there's definitely a problem there.
The external drive is a new 2 terabye drive that I purchased yesterday? The manual incremental took 30 min to complete BTW. How can you tell from the above attachment that the M drive is running slow? I would like to know so I can take the drive and a printout of the attachment to Best Buy and ask for a replacement.
I think I see what told you the speed of the write process, could you please confirm (highlighted area of attachment). Is this correct?
Yes, that shows you the task doing the writing, the device or file being written to and the rate of speed. Just try and do a large COPY via Windows to that drive and during the copy, in the li'l COPY window, <click> on "More details" at the bottom. That should show you the speed that a standard Windows COPY takes... it should give you an idea (use a large file).
Hi Froggie, just did a full to another drive using a usb 3 port and the image took 1 hour apx to complete vrs 3 hours for the new drives full image yesterday. I will try moving the new drive to the usb 3 port and do a new full. By the way the transfer rate of the image I just did (according to MR) was 609 mb/s write speed. Will let you know what happens with the new drive. EDIT: the transfer speed as reported by MR for the new drive in the usb 3 port is about 550 mb/s so it looks like its not the drive thats at fault. Projected time to complete the full image on the new drive 1 hr 8 min which is about what I got for the other drive. EDIT 2: OK, canceled the image to the new drive in the usb 3 port and plugged it back into the usb 2 port. Started a full image and the transfer rate is 174 mb/s with an expected time to completion of 3 hours. Clearly I need to run this from a usb 3 port. Of course I can just live with the longer times (I now have my images set to run at 5:30 am - I leave the PC on all the time) the only thing will be issues when I am on the road and miss a backup - I guess I can switch to usb 3 for these. Thoughts?
Frog, That's what I assumed when I skipped the schedule page and clicked next to do my backup, but I wanted to make sure I only made the backup and unscheduled increments weren't being made any way. Now I'll get into the Users Guide to learn how to proceed. Version 6 is a new experience for me to learn. Thanks for responding.
Just tested the latest version (476) and there appears to be an improvement in the speed of first full image. Now 35GB in 4.5'. This is using an internal sata drive.
Guys, please forgive this long post and my ignorance. I've read every single post since you all began talking about v6. Most of it has been Greek to me. I have purchased v6 and I have tried to read & understand the manual and the different backup schemes including GFS and the rest. But, I'm still pretty lost. I've been using AX64 for the past year or so. I've stuck with v1 and even though I paid for v2, I've always only used v1. Up until now, I've used Macrium as my backup to AX64. However, I've only used Macrium for making a full backup image and then incrementals done manually probably once every month or so. Until now, Macrium has purely been a manual process when I remember or have time to take a manual incremental image. I now have a brand new PC with a SSD as my c drive and a 1 TB HD as my d drive. I don't care a whole lot about my d drive as I backup my documents separately both to the cloud and to my external HD. I would, however, like to either use AX64 or use Macrium and based upon what I've been reading, I think I want to focus my energies on Macrium. I want to be able to use Macrium for protection for when I want to test new software or prior to installing windows updates and/or to replace the snapshot-type function of AX64. I'm just not sure how to set up the backup schedule within Macrium. It's all so new to me. As I said, I've only ever used Macrium on a manual basis and maybe once a month. I'm a visual learner, so I really liked the Macrium new videos, but they don't show how to actually set up those schemes that they show. That's why I'm interested in how others are setting up the new v6. Lastly, I've always made a CD or DVD for rescue purposes. I've not used the boot menu that some of you have discussed. It sounds cool, but I'm not quite sure how to do it. I'll continue to read and learn from all of you. Thanks.
Once you establish the basic FOREVER INCREMENTAL definition set, at the scheduler portion, just add separate entries for each hour you want the snap for a DAILY for 7-days (or 5). Even if you have the DEF setup already, you can select it and use the EDIT tool (PENCIL) and pop through the screens 'til you get back to the scheduler window and add more schedules under that DEF spec. I have a scheduled hourly for each hour from 0800-2200 each day. Yes, it takes a few minutes to set up each hourly scheduled snap, but once done, you have yourself (in my case) a 15-hour umbrella of hourly snaps. If you do this with a synthetic baseline, it'll crawl along the baseline as time goes on. If you leave that setting out (of the DEF), the 1st snap (a FULL) will remain in time and the next <n> (whatever your limit is) will crawl along. If you stare at it long enough it all becomes clear (yea, right)
I see that Home and Workstation are essentially the same product, except that Home is cheaper. Is that correct? There is a feature comparison here.
I had to play with this a bit but its pretty straight forward. If I miss anything could someone please correct me. 1: open MR and make sure you have the "Create A Backup" tab selected (I think its selected by default but cannot remember for sure) select (by putting a check in the appropriate boxes) which drives you want protected. I think all drives were auto selected and I had to un-tick my backup drive but again I cannot recall for sure. 2: click on the menu item "Backup". 3: the bottom item is "Backup Templates", click on it 4: the basic GFC template comes up by default, edit it as you see fit (to edit date & times click on the "edit schedule" button in the midlle of the window) to edit the retention schedule just change the numbers in the boxes 5: click OK Now, go to the Scheduled Backups tab you should see your schedule ready to go. AS for the Boot Menu item its even easier, go to the menu item "Other Tasks", click on "Add Recovery Boot Menu Option" the rest will take care of itself (you may have to OK the process but its a wizard at worst so you should have no problems) I hope this helps and I believe it is complete
An alternative to TheRollBackFrog's suggestion might be to create a daily schedule, then using Windows Task Scheduler manually change the frequency to hourly. Once done, Macrium's UI will reflect the change. As for replicating AX64's merging schedule - I can't find a way of doing it without resorting to either having multiple baselines, or using differentials. I find it a bit annoying that with hourly incrementals it insists on merging them with each backup - seems a waste of resources given that 99% of the incrementals will never be restored. Preferred the way AX64 did it. I suspect I'll end up using a Grandfather, Father, Son schedule (perhaps a couple of different ones).
Just thought I would mention that I just, for testing purposes, ran a baseline image with AX64. This image was of my OS & data which is essentially my c: drive so it included 98% of everything on my PC. The storage drive is a 2 terabyte WD USB 3 external drive that is plugged into a usb 2 port. It took 3 hours for MR V6 to image my PC yesterday morning, the baseline image with AX64 took just over an hour to the same drive plugged into the same port. How is this possible? AX64 cannot be that much faster than MR can it?
For what its worth,,,,and for the time being at least,,,,I am using both AX64 & MR V6 together. I have the basic GFC template scheduled to run more or less as provided by the template. These are my insurance backups, for hourly snaps I am using AX64. In a best case scenario I will never need to use MR to do a restore. AX64 will take care of that job when nec. In a worst case scenario I will have a failed AX64 cold restore and I will have to use MR to restore to the image just prior to where I wanted to go with AX64. Once this is done I will use AX64s browser to recover any files I may need. Its a very simple strategy that will give me hourly snaps with AX64s merge schedule (obviously). No doubt at some point down the line, once I am more comfortable with MR, I will create a 2nd backup schedule in MR to do hourly snaps but for now this is the lazy mans way to get what we are talking about. Just thought I would also mention that I will continue to do weekly full images to a different backup drive using Paragon as I have been doing for the past x number of years. This drive is rotated with a 2nd one to an off-site location every 4 weeks. MR has not replaced anything I have been doing, its supplementing it,,,,at least for now.
