Macrium Reflect, For Those Who Haven't Tried It Yet

After using MR to make Win7 system images for a few years, I just had
my first need to restore an image because my system started not
booting reliably. Windows 7 was having trouble finding a file.

A System Restore point from a few days ago wouldn't complete because
of some unknown problem.

So I used the MR Rescue Disk, created earlier, and restored an image
from 02/25/18 successfully! Easy to do with no glitches and it
solved my problem.

Kudos to MR!

Now I will make images more often than monthly.

DC

DennyCrane wrote:

After using MR to make Win7 system images for a few years, I just had
my first need to restore an image because my system started not
booting reliably. Windows 7 was having trouble finding a file.

A System Restore point from a few days ago wouldn't complete because
of some unknown problem. So I used the MR Rescue Disk, created
earlier, and restored an image from 02/25/18 successfully! Easy to
do with no glitches and it solved my problem.

Another option is to add MR as a boot-time option. When you have it add
itself, there is not another partition on the drive but instead an image
file (.wim) gets loaded as an image. Same happens if you add Windows
recovery as a boot-time option. After having MR add itself as a
boot-time option, you can see it got added by running "bcdedit" (no
parameters). You don't have to hunt for a CD to do the recovery.

Now I will make images more often than monthly.

Monthly backups means you will lose a month's worth of changes to your
drive when you restore, plus restore granularity is at month-long
intervals. The free version of MR supports full and differential
backups (the paid version adds incremental). If you use local or
network storage, you can schedule MR to perform daily backups, like a
full once per week and differentials every day (the differential on the
full backup day will be tiny - just make sure to schedule differentials
to occur later than fulls).

System Restore built into Windows only works sometimes. It is not a
reliable means of restoring Windows back to a prior state. It is only a
file and registry backup and only for system files. That is only a
portion of changes to the drive when *using* Windows.

If I paid for MR, I'd use the grandfather-father-son scheme: monthly
full backups, weekly differentials, and daily incrementals. However,
that still means you lose any changes made to the drive during the day.
Using MR's retention policies, you can decide how far your backups go
depending on how much storage space you have for the backups. I use a
drive solely to save the backup images.

Backups should ALWAYS be scheduled. If they aren't scheduled, you won't
run them as often as you should. When it comes time to restore, you'll
realize that your manually-initiated backup points were erratic and
you'll lose a lot more than you planned. You could use a reminder to
popup to remind you but why bother when you can schedule the backups.

Acronis TrueImage and Paragon's Backup & Restore have their secure zones
(they work the same because the programmer's at one moved to the other
company and brough the same technique). TrueImage is payware. B&R has
a freeware version. The ATI's secure zone and Paragon's Backup Capsule
protect the backup images by not assigning a drive letter to the
partition holding the backup image files and using a special partition
type to keep partition tools at bay (it is an unknown partition type).
The secure zone works well enough. However, I found Macrium Reflect to
be more reliable to perform restores. I might pay for MR to get itsw
ransomware protection: a rootkit driver that prevents access to the
storage location for the backup image files. All of them can be
circumvented but they do afford extra protection, especially if you
don't keep off-line copies of the backups.

On Wed, 14 Mar 2018 16:46:07 -0500, VanguardLH wrote:

DennyCrane wrote:

After using MR to make Win7 system images for a few years, I just had
my first need to restore an image because my system started not
booting reliably. Windows 7 was having trouble finding a file.

A System Restore point from a few days ago wouldn't complete because
of some unknown problem. So I used the MR Rescue Disk, created
earlier, and restored an image from 02/25/18 successfully! Easy to
do with no glitches and it solved my problem.

Another option is to add MR as a boot-time option. When you have it add
itself, there is not another partition on the drive but instead an image
file (.wim) gets loaded as an image. Same happens if you add Windows
recovery as a boot-time option. After having MR add itself as a
boot-time option, you can see it got added by running "bcdedit" (no
parameters). You don't have to hunt for a CD to do the recovery.

Now I will make images more often than monthly.

Monthly backups means you will lose a month's worth of changes to your
drive when you restore, plus restore granularity is at month-long
intervals. The free version of MR supports full and differential
backups (the paid version adds incremental). If you use local or
network storage, you can schedule MR to perform daily backups, like a
full once per week and differentials every day (the differential on the
full backup day will be tiny - just make sure to schedule differentials
to occur later than fulls).

System Restore built into Windows only works sometimes. It is not a
reliable means of restoring Windows back to a prior state. It is only a
file and registry backup and only for system files. That is only a
portion of changes to the drive when *using* Windows.

If I paid for MR, I'd use the grandfather-father-son scheme: monthly
full backups, weekly differentials, and daily incrementals. However,
that still means you lose any changes made to the drive during the day.
Using MR's retention policies, you can decide how far your backups go
depending on how much storage space you have for the backups. I use a
drive solely to save the backup images.

Backups should ALWAYS be scheduled. If they aren't scheduled, you won't
run them as often as you should. When it comes time to restore, you'll
realize that your manually-initiated backup points were erratic and
you'll lose a lot more than you planned. You could use a reminder to
popup to remind you but why bother when you can schedule the backups.

Acronis TrueImage and Paragon's Backup & Restore have their secure zones
(they work the same because the programmer's at one moved to the other
company and brough the same technique). TrueImage is payware. B&R has
a freeware version. The ATI's secure zone and Paragon's Backup Capsule
protect the backup images by not assigning a drive letter to the
partition holding the backup image files and using a special partition
type to keep partition tools at bay (it is an unknown partition type).
The secure zone works well enough. However, I found Macrium Reflect to
be more reliable to perform restores. I might pay for MR to get itsw
ransomware protection: a rootkit driver that prevents access to the
storage location for the backup image files. All of them can be
circumvented but they do afford extra protection, especially if you
don't keep off-line copies of the backups.

I've recovered with Macrium Reflect full backups a couple of times
successfully. Way back on Win98, a few computers back I used a couple
of other backup imaging programs that I depended on. My current
machine has a BIOS that is condusive to over clocking and when I first
built it I messed around with that before giving it up as a waste of
time. My image backups got a good workout playing with overclocks! I
own some software that WILL NOT reinstall. It has 'timed out', a
gimmick they use to make you buy it again. So, again, thank God for
image backups.

I recently read that different version levels of Macrium may not
recover properly. I haven't updated my Macrium for this reason and on
the theory if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have a 32 bit Macrium in
my WinXP, and I backed up the Win7 64 bit partition with it. I never
tried to recover the Win7 partition as yet, but after reading about
the trouble between versions I downloaded free Macrium 64 bit in Win 7
and backed it up that way.

I've always been afraid of differential and incremental backups as I
thought they added complexity. Yeah I probably don't full backup often
enough and have found this inconvenient at times when I lose a month's
changes. But the only thing that I'd really miss is my emails if I
lost them. So I devised a bat file that runs on shutdown (in XP where
I spend most of my time) and it copies any changed Eudora email files
off C: drive to my data drive. It does slow my shutdown as my Eudora
shelters YEARs of email, but I can live with it.

My Mac backups are on a USB passport drive that is only connected when
I'm backing up.