Macrim versus True Image?

I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back ups.
How does that program compare with True Image? I have been using TI
2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and I'm just
curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.

In message , Aj St. Johns
writes:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back
ups. How does that program compare with True Image? I have been using
TI 2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and I'm just
curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.

The two main are Macrium and Acronis, but there are also others - EaseUS
do one, I think, for example. (I'm not sure which "True Image" is -
Acronis, I think.)

Sorry, can't answer your question. I _think_ they're much of a muchness,
but have only used Macrium (5, free). Even the WinPE version of that
fits on a mini-CD, which I like as it's easy to carry around (and less
likely to get broken than a full-size CD); maybe the others can be too.
I've found it's fine, for the XP (SP3) and 10 I've used it on. (The 10
system took far longer to image [preparatory to switching to SSD] than I
expected, but I suspect that was more a matter of the hardware in use
(external HD via USB2) than anything to do with the software, and would
have been similar for all of them.)
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Can a blue man sing the whites?

Aj St. Johns wrote:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back ups.
How does that program compare with True Image? I have been using TI
2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and I'm just
curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.

It's free. As a promotional vehicle, there is a
free version for download. And it's not a trial version.
It's really free.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Notice the feature set tick boxes. The full-featured
product costs money. But the free version is worthwhile
for encouraging people to make backups.

I checked out the Acronis TIH and it had a relatively
nice GUI, which is simple for people to understand. The
Macrium comes in second-place in that regard. As some
people have trouble figuring out what the display
is showing them. You could say "it takes practice"
before you become fluent.

Macrium offers plenty of info. There is a manual. There
is a knowledgebase with articles. So there isn't a vacuum
if you have the toolset to track down the necessary info.

It's free... and it is better than the Win7 System Image backup.
In that you have access to the data later, by "mounting" the
MRIMG image file as a disk drive. Macrium will also
convert the MRIMG into a .vhd, for usage with virtual
machines. And a VHD can be accessed with 7ZIP, if you need
a familiar tool for extracting files from a VHD. So I like
the "post-backup workflow" as well.

The Macrium boot CD has a "boot repair" option, and it
did actually help with a problem I was working on. I still
needed a bit of command line monkey business to finish the
job, but the boot repair got me 90% of the way there. Recommended.

Paul

On 12/17/2016 10:35 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Aj St. Johns
writes:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back
ups. How does that program compare with True Image? I have been
using TI 2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and
I'm just curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.

The two main are Macrium and Acronis, but there are also others - EaseUS
do one, I think, for example. (I'm not sure which "True Image" is -
Acronis, I think.)

Sorry, can't answer your question. I _think_ they're much of a muchness,
but have only used Macrium (5, free). Even the WinPE version of that
fits on a mini-CD, which I like as it's easy to carry around (and less
likely to get broken than a full-size CD); maybe the others can be too.
I've found it's fine, for the XP (SP3) and 10 I've used it on. (The 10
system took far longer to image [preparatory to switching to SSD] than I
expected, but I suspect that was more a matter of the hardware in use
(external HD via USB2) than anything to do with the software, and would
have been similar for all of them.)

Both Acronis and Macrium will fit on small thumb drives, more portable
than mini-CDs. I've got Macrium on an old 500M thumb drive, small
footprint.

Paul wrote:
Aj St. Johns wrote:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back
ups. How does that program compare with True Image? I have been
using TI 2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and
I'm just curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.

It's free. As a promotional vehicle, there is a
free version for download. And it's not a trial version.
It's really free.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

Notice the feature set tick boxes. The full-featured
product costs money. But the free version is worthwhile
for encouraging people to make backups.

I checked out the Acronis TIH and it had a relatively
nice GUI, which is simple for people to understand. The
Macrium comes in second-place in that regard. As some
people have trouble figuring out what the display
is showing them. You could say "it takes practice"
before you become fluent.

Macrium offers plenty of info. There is a manual. There
is a knowledgebase with articles. So there isn't a vacuum
if you have the toolset to track down the necessary info.

It's free... and it is better than the Win7 System Image backup.
In that you have access to the data later, by "mounting" the
MRIMG image file as a disk drive. Macrium will also
convert the MRIMG into a .vhd, for usage with virtual
machines. And a VHD can be accessed with 7ZIP, if you need
a familiar tool for extracting files from a VHD. So I like
the "post-backup workflow" as well.

The Macrium boot CD has a "boot repair" option, and it
did actually help with a problem I was working on. I still
needed a bit of command line monkey business to finish the
job, but the boot repair got me 90% of the way there. Recommended.

Paul

https://davescomputertips.com/how-to...mage-as-a-vhd/

Not that I prefer that to a Macrium backup. The main reason being that
Macrium can image a full drive, including the restore partition and any
other partition on the drive.

Ed

On 12/17/2016 10:21 AM, Aj St. Johns wrote:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back ups.
How does that program compare with True Image? I have been using TI
2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and I'm just
curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.
IIRC the free version of Macrium as much as it's great for image backup
and restore on same size drive, I don't think it resizes well,
especially smaller drive.

I'm sure you can put a 100G image on a 250G drive, Macrium might just
make a 100G partition. That would be the worst case since you could
easily expand it. Look at MinTool Partition Wizard.

I only say this as I was putting a large 300G drive image (only 60G
data) onto an SSD and I manually shrunk the partition using windows
built in utils and then made the image so it would go on the new 128
SSD. I think the paid version will do resizing though.

Aj St. Johns wrote:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back ups.
How does that program compare with True Image? I have been using TI
2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and I'm just
curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.


I run TI using an unattended overnight batch file so its run time does not
affect my PC use during the day. Not sure if Macrim has batch run
capabilities.


--
Zaidy036

Big Al wrote:
On 12/17/2016 10:21 AM, Aj St. Johns wrote:
I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back ups.
How does that program compare with True Image? I have been using TI
2013 in CD form for several years now without incident, and I'm just
curious as to the differences between the programs.

Thanks.
IIRC the free version of Macrium as much as it's great for image backup
and restore on same size drive, I don't think it resizes well,
especially smaller drive.

I'm sure you can put a 100G image on a 250G drive, Macrium might just
make a 100G partition. That would be the worst case since you could
easily expand it. Look at MinTool Partition Wizard.

I only say this as I was putting a large 300G drive image (only 60G
data) onto an SSD and I manually shrunk the partition using windows
built in utils and then made the image so it would go on the new 128
SSD. I think the paid version will do resizing though.

Macrium *does* resize.

http://kb.macrium.com/Uploads/Images/clone-3.png

What it does not do (easily), is change the origin of a partition.

To resize, when cloning or imaging, once you select the
destination image (while the source image is still present),
click the "Next" button, then the "Back" button. The lower
(destination) disk layout will then show the partitions
as they are about to be restored or cloned.

Click on a partition. Look near the bottom, for a button
that says something about customizing.

In the resulting dialog, you can set the alignment
to "MSDOS" or "Vista" (63 sector, or megabyte alignment).
You can change the size of the partition, and make it
smaller. Or larger.

When you make it smaller, there is a tendency for the
output partition to be "mostly defragmented", as if it
was doing a file by file copy to the different-sized
output. But due to $MFT reservation, I suspect some
of the files near the end are fragmented, because
of some aspect of metadata getting in the way. While
I was hoping to get "defragmentation for free" by
doing that, it didn't happen. Some of the files
were still fragmented.

So the only feature I couldn't get in a direct way,
is changing the origin or order of partitions. Now,
you can "fake it" by processing one partition at a time,
but then the boot repair and UUID editing the program
does, aren't going to happen. So you would have much
cleanup later, to make it boot.

And while the CD has boot repair capabilities, nothing
is perfect. And you'd better have your Rocket Scientist
hat on, to finish the job manually.

*******

Paragon has a free partition manager download, but it
barely offers more than the capabilities that Windows
has built in. So it's mostly an "advertising platform".
Easeus has a Paritition Manager too, but with some of
these products, they have OpenCandy on them (Paragon
does not). The funny part, is at least one of the
OpenCandy-containing softwares I downloaded, the
OpenCandy was "neutered" and didn't do anything.
(As tested in a VM for safety.) So you can scrounge
around and find *something* to finish a job like this.

GParted is fine for repair work, except more and more
"rules" are appearing as time goes on, so you will find
menu entries dimmed out. That's not what I expect from
my "smash and grab" utilities :-) Extra trickery is involved
now, to eat and enjoy your free lunch.

Paul

"Aj St. Johns" wrote:

I notice some people on here talk about using Macrim for their back ups.

Have you tallied how many are discussing the FREEware version of
Macrium? Acronis does not have any freeware. It's all payware (unless
you happen to have a Seagate drive and get the old TI 2009 version for
free).

How does that program compare with True Image?

The biggest change with Macrium Reflect Free is the lack of all the
bloatware in the TI package. The bloatware in the TI package cannot be
deleted, only disabled.

I have been using TI 2013 in CD form for several years now without
incident, and I'm just curious as to the differences between the
programs.

The biggest reason I left TI was failure to perform restores. It would
say it could not find the backup media or it would fail during the
backup. Not a problem with Macrium. Backups are a complete waste of
time if they are not usable to perform restores. My average with TI was
half of my restore attempts would fail due to problems finding the
backups or failures during the restores. Too high for me. I've
restored several times using Macrium Reflect without one failure.

Oh, the "verify" option in TI is worthless. All that does is redo the
backup and verify the same hash was generated as was saved in the backup
file. Okay, so what happens when the restore operation cannot find the
backups (which, in my case, were not on USB drives but internal hard
disks)? What happens when it fails during a read of the backup image
file? What happens when there is failure to write the backup image?
All of those problems were intrinsic only to TI. I never had a restore
problem with Macrium Reflect or even with Easeus ToDo.

On Sat, 17 Dec 2016 17:08:34 -0600, VanguardLH wrote in


snip

The biggest reason I left TI was failure to perform restores. It would
say it could not find the backup media or it would fail during the
backup. Not a problem with Macrium. Backups are a complete waste of
time if they are not usable to perform restores. My average with TI was
half of my restore attempts would fail due to problems finding the
backups or failures during the restores. Too high for me. I've
restored several times using Macrium Reflect without one failure.

snip

Thanks very much for this post. A very thorough and interesting
presentation.
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