think ive narrowed it to macrium reflect or image for windows

anyone have any thoughts either way.. please dont do the a vs b.. im looking for real world reasons to lean one way or the other based on features and how well each can do that task. does anyone have experience with both that care to share? this is for pc's i dont want to do a ton of install uninstall etc on so i hope to pick the right choice first (which rarely happens lol)
both are about the same cost wise and both seem to be highly recc around most places. my mom was running ti 2010 but she is having some issues with it. and shadow protect is way out of her budget especially for what she needs it for.

i want to set her up with a schedule that she doesnt have to do herself. of course ill monitor it when im there just to make sure it working okay..

does either make a mess after install i.e. like ti and trying to remove its services etc.. do either run many services except maybe the scheduler..things like that are what i hope to find out. if they work well enough i may even give up shadow protect just because of the cost of adding it to new machines we bring in.. both seem to be decent options though

thank you

 

Does Macrium Reflect support splitting the image across several CD-R's or DVD-R's?
Could be a problem if your imaging larger than a 15GB install even with compressing.

 

i dont think that is needed even honestly i would prob not be backing up to discs. i almost always use external drives and make multiple backups

 

I have tried Macrium Reflect and liked it really. Backup is fast, nice GUI. Only thing i didnt like was the Restore times. It was slow in comparison with IfW or Acronis. Other than that its a good freeware (it still is or?).

 

i would get the paid version since i want to do incrementals

 

I really like Macrium Reflect. It backs up and restores fairly quick. Also, the paid version entitles you to their WinPE Recovery environment, which you can burn to a CD and/or install in your hard drive--when booting up your PC, it'll give you a choice on whether to boot Windows or the recovery environment. IMHO, that is a big plus because loading a WinPE environment from a CD can be slow (~5 minutes; I know, that's not a lot).

 

I recommend Macrium Reflect simply because having used it hundreds of times on a wide variety of systems I've never experienced a bad restore.

 

Here are a couple of other things to consider that have not been mentioned yet:

• Image for Windows does does use VSS, but rather they use Phylock which is their own software.
  
• Image for Windows does not mount images as virtual drives. They use TBIview as a means to extract data from an image.
  
• There is an article here about how to restore to different hardware. At the end of the article there is this rather interesting statement. "Wouldn’t it be great if the Macrium Reflect restore process could do this automatically? What about changing the HAL as well? Well, we’re working on this and more! I’ll post here when it’s available." This leads me to believe that there will be great things in version 5.
  
• Any sort of PE disc will allow you the opportunity to do things other that create and restore disc; it will allow you put use portable malware scanners (AVPTool, CureIt), portable partitioners, or virtually anything else that you chose to put in your "toolbox".

Also, just to reiterate what ambient 88 said, having the ability to boot into a recovery environment that is on your harddisk and seperate from optical discs is a huge plus. I've only seem that feature on Acronis True Image.

 

I agree. I have been restoring a lot with macrium as I futz with things. I use bartPE in ramdisk so my boot times are about 30 seconds, and image restore is about 3 minutes in my case. I have not had a bad restore or image yet. I am personally holding off on buying macrium until the next version is out, which has been talked about but no definate date set. Having used many other programs, I found macrium to be the most trouble free. To each his own but I have had 0 reasons to even think about using something else.

Sul.

 

Both Image For Windows and Macrium Reflect are great apps.

Personally I prefer IFW because:
a) with Image For DOS gives the ability to make a cold image of the system.
b) with TeraByte OS Deployment Tool Suite and their automatic restoration script is the fastest way to restore an image.
c)Their support. Simply the best.

On the other hand Macrium Reflect has also the ability to create backups of folder/files and it gives you the ability to perform incrementals. Pay attention though that the incrementals are the weak point of Macrium Reflect (I have seen several times bad incrementals); the auto-verification is very usefull in such cases.

But since it is for your mom why not let her decide?

ps. In case she opts for macrium... Macrium Reflect - home user 4 license pack

Panagiotis

 

Hi,

I've used version7,8, & 9 of Acronis TI, tried Shadowportect, and now am VERY satisfied user of 'paid' Macrium Reflect. When I restored my PC with the free version it took 35 min. this seemed reasonable.

Take Care
Rico

 

It is nice not having to find your recovery disk. It's available with IFD and IFL but you have to set up the recovery partition yourself. Not difficult for the experienced but not done by the install CD as with True Image.

 

I do know that with the paid version of Macrium Reflect using the PE 2.0 restores were about 5x faster than they were with the linux recovery environment.

 

wow good to know. when i tried the free version, the restore took ca. 3x the times of the backups.

 

macrium reflect won't restore to a smaller partition/hard drive than the original drive. That can be a problem for some people, for me it's a big problem. Also macrium reflect when I used it wouldn't do a backup from the bootcd (only restores from the bootcd). That is something to think about. The scheduler on macrium reflect works great when I used it, and I also liked the abilty to do instant backups by double clicking on a xml file. It is also just as quick as true image (the software I compare against all other software) and very simple to use. I stopped using it because I suffered a "coldcase" an image that wouldn't restore. This is the only imaging software that has ever gave me a "coldcase" that I couldn't fix. Even true image has never gave me a coldcase. I demand 100 percent success rate every time, 99 percent isn't good enough for me.

 

Using macrium PE, I found this drive size issue as well. I resized my partition to approx 20gb greater than what my baseline install is, then made the image. Now I can put nearly any size hdd I want in place as macrium is easily capable of upsizing the partition/drive when it restores. I 'think' I read that the next version of macrium will have no such limitation.

I am able to boot into bartPE and create an image of a real hdd (not the virtual ram drive bartPE uses). I imaged the normal c: to the normal f: if memory serves correctly.

That is funny the 'coldcase'. I like macrium because for me it gives 100% where some others are <=99%. Hardware differences I would imagine.

Sul.

 

does image for win have the same issue that is one thing i NEED im always swapping hardware including hdd's out. i need the resize for restore ... i know acronis does

 

I do not know if Marcium Reflect can do this right now. I do know that version 5, which will be out "soon" has many enhancements. Also, part of the beauty of using a PE disc is that you can put any application you want in that ISO, including disc partitioning applications.

 

Yes, the TeraByte apps allow restoring to a smaller partition. In IFW, if you click Information on a partition, it will tell you how small you can go. For example, my C: drive is 7901 MiB Used, 5112 MiB Free and I can restore to a 8559 MiB partition.

 

right but if i end up dropping in a smaller drive then what i had i cant just partition it down... the other way around i could.

do you know if ifw has that issue? edit answered above

i really need to build a new test system again..

 

The TeraByte apps do a sector oriented restore. So if you have used a defragging app to put your sectors in a special order (such as boot files at the start of the partition) , this will be preserved in the restore. I don't know about recent TI versions but it used to do a file oriented restore (like Ghost 2003) and you lost your defragging arrangement of sectors. Another defrag was needed to get it back.

 

I would like to know this myself,as I do not have an external harddrive,
and would need several DVD-R's to copy my C:drives 32 Gb's

 

Below is a response by Nick of Macrium at their support forums.

 

n8chavez :

OK,understood.
Thank you for your response.


SammyJack.

 

I too have a tendency to 'serial tweak' and constantly install the latest beta,etc.I probably restore anything up to 6 or 7 times a week and everything always works flawlessly afterwards.With the forthcoming improvements you mentioned it'd take something earth shattering to make me want to switch product.