Ed Cryer wrote:
I like safety in my backups. So I regularly do both a System image with
Win10's Win7-style app, and then a Macrium Reflect one.

I did two today; Win10 took almost 2 hours, Macrium took 19mins.

1TB spinning HD, C partition occupies it all, apart from a few small
ones for reset etc. Which means that Macrium had even more to write.

Why is this? Why does Windows take so long? It's not doing anything more
than Macrium, and, in addition, it comes from MS themselves, the
creators of this system, the supposed connoisseurs.

Ed

Windows Defender can interfere with your work.

If I turn off WD Real-Time Scan, my hashdeep runs
go three times faster.

Since your ratios are so much larger, I would have
to conclude those runs are backing up a different
set of partitions.

Presumably the Windows 10 built-in was writing to
an external target which was not part of the
backup source itself.

Both the Win10 built-in and Macrium, use a variation
on VHD for storage. Only occupied clusters should be
recorded. While Macrium has compression, you can still
compare the output size and see if something is amiss
in a major way. I don't think Win10 built-in has the
ability to do sector by sector - you might be able
to mis-configure Macrium, but the Win10 one should
remain about as good as these methods can get
(for a *full* backup, not an incremental or differential).

If Macrium is doing incrementals, of course it's faster.
The paid version of Macrium is capable of more trickery
than the free version :-)

Paul