Hi and thank you for reading my post. Hope you won't mind helping me with some clarification regarding Macrium Reflect and which options I should select.

I recently downloaded an older free version of the software Macrium Reflect v 8.0.7783. There appears to be 2 options (clone this disk and image this disk). I'm not sure which I should select. The manual says "Disk Image stores the information required to completely restore disks" and "Cloning with Macrium Reflect creates an exact copy of partitions to a different drive. When you Clone a hard drive, you can boot from the target disk on the same system after cloning. Important Windows cannot boot from a USB-connected drive. This is a restriction imposed by Windows. If you clone your system disk to a USB-connected external drive then, to boot your clone, the physical disk must be removed from the USB caddy and attached internally."

Not sure if I'm interpreting this correctly but if I choose Image This Disk, it will create an ISO of my entire laptop drive that I can store on an external. Does this mean I can mount the image using something like virtual clonedrive and retrieve files and folders individually while also using it to restore entire drive contents if necessary without having to do that USB caddy removal and internal drive attachment procedure they described in the manual?

They also have this option on the left that says "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows. Should I also do that as well? I'm assuming that partition is OS (C: )

Any advice is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!

 

Hey korniceman3000

Cloning a disk is for when you want to copy your existing HD on to another physical disk, you normally do this if you upgrade to a bigger disk or if your existing HD is showing signs of failure. Cloning a disk would normally copy all partitions including the windows system partitions as well as the data ones.

Imaging a disk makes a file copy of however many partitions you choose to image and this is used in case you get a virus, or system corruption just to name a couple of examples and once you restore the image it restores your machine back to the same state that it was at the time of creating the image. This stores the data in a proprietory file type and some imaging softwares do let you open the archived file (bit like a zip file) and you can extract data from it.

I image my DAW computer often keeping a couple of previous copies on an external HD, I also backup certain windows files and various application data which should I need to restore the main windows image I have the separate updated file of installed apps and there configs. For me it keeps everything up to date in case of that emergency.

When I build a new computer I always take a RAW image of just the main Windows installation and all drivers that have been installed and all my OS tweaks so I can always take it back to a vanilla state.

I also take a MAIN image which contains all the Windows partitions.

When building a computer like a Studio computer I take periodic images as I install and configure more software.

My day to day Image only contains my Windows OS partition my C:\ , any separate data partitions are automactially backed up to various NAS.

I use the following

Imaging Software: Acronis True Image
Windows Backup Software: Nova Backup and Urgent Backup

Always keep images and backups OFF of your main computers hard disk.

There is a very important saying "Always Backup the Backup"

 

Last edited: Oct 15, 2024 at 9:24 PM

I use Macrium Free, same version you relate. I dont clone. I have a PE Windows USB (which Macrium did for me), with it I reboot the machine to the USB and without even touching it , it Opens Macrium interface were I choose what point of restore I will do, usually an incremental or differential latest bup. I recommend you do retention rules, decide when to do a complete bup, how many incremental/diff ones in between, etc. This is good to avoid incrementing your backup disk space dramatically , you can choose how many bups to keep, etc, probably you already know that. I do incrementals whenever I uninstall/install something.
EDIT I meant Differential backups, thats what I use, ( as Incrementals are not included in the free version ) there is a good tutorial well documented here (4 parts):
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/61026-backup-restore-macrium-reflect.html#Part1

 

Last edited: Oct 15, 2024 at 10:29 PM

You want to use IMAGE. It only copies data and not empty sectors.
And with one of the "paid" Macrium versions, it even can run the image as a Virtual Machine. It is slow, but it works. That way I was able to virtually run the old computer from the image and load a 10 year old Ableton project and write down certain plugin settings.

I can highly recommend Macrium. It is 100% reliable (True Image is not, because it is buggy!) and is also not such a horrible bloatware like True Image, which is the Norton among disk imagers.

 

Last edited: Oct 16, 2024 at 3:33 AM

Thank you so much for all the detailed answers! Greatly appreciated! I guess the general consensus is to do image and not cloning as that seems much more versatile. I'll do a full image each time I have added some major new software so I can have some additional back ups. According to Macrium, you can mount the image in windows explorer and access like a portable drive so that makes things really flexible.

I was wondering, if you run the image as a virtual machine, can it be done on any computer/laptop as long as you have something like Hyper-V, VMware, Virtual box, or Macrium's ViBoot) or does that computer have to have the exact same OS, hardware, and drivers? I was reading some instructions from the Macrium site about having to create a Rescue Media ISO image, then create a virtual machine, then assigning to it a vCPU, Memory and a Virtual Hard Disk, then boot the VM using the created Rescue Media ISO image and from booted Rescue Media restore image on Virtual Hard Disk attached to your VM. I was confused as hell. I think I'm getting this mixed up with the system recovery stuff where you hit escape until you get that menu and assign what drive order you want to boot...

 

What you describe does not ring a bell here. This was some years ago, so I don't remember the details anymore, but I don't remember it being complicated. But do not expect the VM being fast. It is slow, but if it is the only way, to make your old backup as a computer system run again, then it can be a life saver.

Here's the point I have learned about data backup software over 30 years: you maybe will not need it for 10 years, but when you need it, it must work 100%. And I had terrible problems, especially with that free Chinese software AOMEI. When you need it and want to restore something, then you are not sure, if there will not be suddenly an error (cannot do it, because "partition changed" or something stupid - which is something the software has to check, already when you do the backup, not when it's too late... ).
This also happened to me once with this incredible Acronis Bloatware.

I was forced to Marcium, because the best and most reliable backup software was Paragon Backup, which was destroyed. Not the most user friendly, and sometimes confusing, but 100% reliable in the very best German engineering tradition. But it seems then Paragon was sold and suddenly the new versions, looking great, no longer had any reliability. Even the GUI was buggy. So I was almost forced to give Macrium a try. It is extremely reliable.

 

Always expect the worst. For example, you want to restore your entire C:/ hard drive, but the restoration with an emergency rescue CDROM etc. doesn't work.

Then the only option is to reinstall. You can then delete all the old data using a DBAN CDROM. Reinstalling with a USB stick can also go wrong.
Be smart and sensible and don't just rely on one backup. Burn the most important data and programs onto a CD, DVD or BluRay and store them safely. USB sticks are not a secure data backup.

In museums where cultural assets are stored on BluRay, all BluRays are burned again at some point (according to plan).
You can also buy a fireproof/waterproof document box, starting at around 64 EUR, and store important copies there.

For 15 years I have always made complete backups of the C:/ hard drive onto a second hard drive, which you can of course remove and reinstall if necessary. I was able to restore my system several times using the Norton Ghost program.

The screen froze twice - BKA fake with a Bitcoin demand and once I had a polyphonic virus that ate the files. At the moment I am using Ashamppo Backup Backup Pro 25 - I even bought it and hope that the program doesn't let me down. As the previous speaker said, Acronis and Aomei are rubbish.

 

I usually make dvd rar copies of all my software and music projects so I have a physical storage version as well as a back up external with the unarchived ones. I do have some stored in a safe deposit box as well. I tried the free Aomei once on a new Asus laptop with only 30 GB used on a 500 GB HD and somehow it failed to create the backup image twice so I started questioning their reliability despite some pretty good reviews from tech radar, lifewire, and PC world (possibly due to pay to write scheme). The one thing I liked was the easy to use simple interface that even a newbie like me could understand without being intimidated. Most likely going to need to buy more portable drives to house all the storage since I read about how difficult it is to retrieve files from failing SSD drives compared to the older HDDs. How powerful does the computer have to be to run a virtual machine, especially since this is the backup of an entire laptop?

 

System requirements for System Center Virtual Machine Manager
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center/vmm/system-requirements?view=sc-vmm-2022

 

Hmm... According to my task manager my Dell inspiron 14 has 4 cores Base speed 2.61 GHz Cpu and 8 GB ram but somehow I doubt it will be sufficient. The laptop hits 50 celsius when I have a bunch of chrome tabs open especially for pages like youtube, facebook, and my google ads page. For some reason my google ads campaign page, beatstars page, and some youtube pages use 300+ MB of ram. When I first bought the laptop 2 weeks ago, the low was 31 celsius, the avg temp was 38 and went up to 45 with 24 chrome tabs and FL Studio 7 with Kontakt. After windows forced a bunch of updates, the computer now starts at 41 celsius and hovers around 49-50 C. I'm guessing it has something to do with those Windows updates (-__-)...