Macrium Reflect questions

Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!

Art Todesco wrote:
Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!

When you did the backup, the default is "Compression enabled". That
means the 67GB of data were compressed before being put in the
..mrimg file. (I always turn compression off, because that's
the kind of guy I am...)

If you right click the .mrimg file, Macrium adds some shellex stuff
to "Mount" the .mrimg. If the .mrimg contains four primary partitions,
your attempt to mount the thing, presents a list of the four
partitions. You can assign a drive letter for each partition
as well as ticking the partition as needing a mount operation.

Note that this isn't side effect free. At one time, there was
a minor fight on my machine, between C: (the real Windows)
and some file on the copy of Windows I mounted as X: . It caused
some warnings when emptying the trash. It didn't seem to
hurt anything. I was in Windows 8 at the time, examining a
Windows 8 backup via mounting it.

With X: mounted, you could compare the contents of one disk with
the other. For example, md5deep recursive-descent scan, would
give a checksum for each file. What probably won't work right,
is junction points.

So you can, in a way, "look" at the results afterwards. But
nothing beats doing an actual restoration, as that's the only
way to verify the Macrium boot CD you burned, is working well
enough to actually restore. You want to verify the Macrium
CD has a working USB driver, so that when the backup drive
is connected, you can look for images on there to restore.

And I have seen a difference in .mrimg size, between a backup
done while Windows is still running, versus a backup of C:
when using the Macrium boot CD to do the backup. I haven't investigated
further to see why there is a size difference. I would hope that
VSS shadow files on the C: drive, are not being copied.

Dis-mounting X: (your Macrium-mounted .mrimg partition), may require
a different path than the mounting step. Try Disk Management and see
if there is a "detach" option. Or alternately, rebooting
should remove it, if all else fails.

You can:

1) Attach .vhd files in the most recent Windows (those are for
virtual OS guests).
2) Attach .mrimg files (Macrium service).
3) Mount ISO files as a virtual CD drive.

so the OSes are gradually improving when it comes
to inspecting stuff. For the older OSes like WinXP,
the above list requires separate tools to achieve.
For example, vhdmount.exe can do (1) for WinXP.

It's possible even Acronis has the same capability (mounting).
At the very least, they have a utility for examining their
older backup files. With enough digging, you can even find
utilities for manipulating NTBACKUP (.bkp) from long ago.

Paul

Ken1943 wrote on 10/5/2015 7:31 PM:
On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 18:36:02 -0400, Art Todesco
wrote:

Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!

They usually use compression. You really don't want a 67gig image
file.

Why not? What does one do with an image file, anyway?

Art Todesco wrote on 10/5/2015 6:36 PM:
Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a
256G SSD with Windows 7 Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in case the c drive gets
corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the
image file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get this. What's missing? I'd also like to
test the backup file so that I won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this without destroying
my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit more user friendly!

Make sure you do a full backup rather than incremental or differential.
I don't know Macrium that much so I'm not sure if it does those type. But an incremental would not be a complete
backup and thus smaller to begin with and then compression makes it even smaller.

Big Al wrote:
Art Todesco wrote on 10/5/2015 6:36 PM:
Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free
version and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a
256G SSD with Windows 7 Pro and all of the installed programs. I want
to do a complete backup in case the c drive gets
corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the program. The c SSD
has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the
image file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I
don't get this. What's missing? I'd also like to
test the backup file so that I won't be doing useless backups every
month. Is there a way to do this without destroying
my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit more user friendly!

Make sure you do a full backup rather than incremental or differential.
I don't know Macrium that much so I'm not sure if it does those type.
But an incremental would not be a complete backup and thus smaller to
begin with and then compression makes it even smaller.

But those would start with a "full" though.

Part of making the GUI of Macrium 6 more complicated, was the
addition of differential and incremental backups. I'm using
version 5 (with the "easy" GUI), while version 6 has been available
for download for some months.

For someone who hasn't done backups before, the
"illustrations" section here can help them with
what differential and incremental are. For a guy like
me, this smacks of "too much preparation", to actually
do incrementals or differentials. I only
like "full". With my various "fulls" put on more than
one drive. Because modern drives have such awe inspiring
reliability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_backup

Paul

Art Todesco wrote on 10/05/2015 6:36 PM:
Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!

Not using Macrium, but from a reference point my Win7 Pro Sp1 drive is
64GB - using Acronis with min and max compression the respective image
sizes are 40 GB and 24 GB.

Check your compression settings in Macrium. Ensure that when you do
create images you also select the System Volume (partition if separate
from the Boot Volume (Partition; the Windows o/s partition).


--
...winston
msft mvp windows experience

Paul wrote on 10/05/2015 9:51 PM:
I only like "full".
With my various "fulls" put on more than
one drive. Because modern drives have such awe inspiring
reliability.


+1
Especially with with hard disk capacity relatively cheap per GB
adequate over-sized storage for images imo is always a plus.


--
...winston
msft mvp windows experience

.. . .winston wrote:
Paul wrote on 10/05/2015 9:51 PM:
I only like "full".
With my various "fulls" put on more than
one drive. Because modern drives have such awe inspiring
reliability.


+1
Especially with with hard disk capacity relatively cheap per GB
adequate over-sized storage for images imo is always a plus.

In the last month, I got a 3TB drive for $112 Canadian.
And when I tested the drive, it didn't suck :-) It
does 200MB/sec on the outer diameter, and so far hasn't
shown me any symptoms that make me regret my purchase.
I expect the drive will "wear" like all the other recent
Seagates do, but I plan to enjoy it until that happens.

Paul

In message , Paul
writes:
[]
When you did the backup, the default is "Compression enabled". That
means the 67GB of data were compressed before being put in the
.mrimg file. (I always turn compression off, because that's
the kind of guy I am...)
[]
I'm glad I'm not the only one! I don't know why, as the information is
still changed in making the .mrimg file anyway - but I just feel it's
one less thing to go wrong, or something like that.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

What if this weren't a hypothetical question?

Ken1943 wrote on 10/5/2015 10:26 PM:
On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 20:27:56 -0400, Alek
wrote:

Ken1943 wrote on 10/5/2015 7:31 PM:
On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 18:36:02 -0400, Art Todesco
wrote:

Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!

They usually use compression. You really don't want a 67gig image
file.

Why not? What does one do with an image file, anyway?

It will restore a whole HDD.

How?

On Mon, 5 Oct 2015 18:36:02 -0400, Art Todesco
wrote:

Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!


In the Macrium options is a check box for "intelligent file copy."
This was checked as default when I installed Macrium. What it does is
NOT copy some files that will be recreated by Windows anyway, such as
pagefile and hiberfile. These can be quite large.

-dan z-





--
Protect your civil rights!
Let the politicians know how you feel.
Join or donate to the NRA today!
http://membership.nrahq.org/default....ignid=XR014887

Gun control is like trying to reduce drunk driving by making it tougher for sober people to own cars.

On 10/5/2015 6:36 PM, Art Todesco wrote:
Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!
..... lots of good answers .....
I knew there must be some compression going on, but they buried it in a
really strange place "edit defaults" rather than something like "option"
or something a little more meaningful. I agree, I don't think I want any
compression. Making is as safe as possible, is my goal.

One other thing, in my mind, image and clone are the same thing. What's
the difference? I know clone is usually used when you want to put in an
SSD. You clone the original, write it to the SSD and then physically
swap out the original drive for the new SSD. I want to just have a good
image or clone of my c SSD so that if I get attacked by a virus or bad
adware, as I did earlier this year, I can revert back to the last
backup. To me, after reading Macrium's text, both should work, but
then, why have the option? BTW, when this happened earlier this year, I
tried everything to clean out this viral adware and nothing could fix
it. I finally had to do a clean reinstall of W7Pro and reinstall of the
programs; a huge job. This adware would attack the browser, both IE and
FF (and I suppose others, too), and when you went to any sales type
site, it would pop up 8 to 10 windows of "buy me" crap all over the
place obliterating the original site that you wanted.

Art Todesco wrote:
On 10/5/2015 6:36 PM, Art Todesco wrote:
Looking for some Macruim Reflect experts. I downloaded the free version
and attempted a image of the c drive. It is a 256G SSD with Windows 7
Pro and all of the installed programs. I want to do a complete backup in
case the c drive gets corrupted or dies. I selected 'image' and ran the
program. The c SSD has 67G of data according to Windows. I put the image
file on a 1T 'backup drive' and it produced a file of 29G. I don't get
this. What's missing? I'd also like to test the backup file so that I
won't be doing useless backups every month. Is there a way to do this
without destroying my present c drive? I wish these programs were a bit
more user friendly!
.... lots of good answers .....
I knew there must be some compression going on, but they buried it in a
really strange place "edit defaults" rather than something like "option"
or something a little more meaningful. I agree, I don't think I want any
compression. Making is as safe as possible, is my goal.

One other thing, in my mind, image and clone are the same thing. What's
the difference? I know clone is usually used when you want to put in an
SSD. You clone the original, write it to the SSD and then physically
swap out the original drive for the new SSD. I want to just have a good
image or clone of my c SSD so that if I get attacked by a virus or bad
adware, as I did earlier this year, I can revert back to the last
backup. To me, after reading Macrium's text, both should work, but
then, why have the option? BTW, when this happened earlier this year, I
tried everything to clean out this viral adware and nothing could fix
it. I finally had to do a clean reinstall of W7Pro and reinstall of the
programs; a huge job. This adware would attack the browser, both IE and
FF (and I suppose others, too), and when you went to any sales type
site, it would pop up 8 to 10 windows of "buy me" crap all over the
place obliterating the original site that you wanted.


Drive #1 --- temporaryfile.mrimg --- Drive #2 this is "imaging"
saved for a rainy day...

Drive #1 --- Drive #2 this is cloning

Cloning is great, if both Drive #1 and Drive #2 are "healthy".

Cloning won't do you a bit of good, if Drive #1 is dead
due to a hardware failure. We use "imaging" to save
the contents of the drive, in a compact format.
That's the temporaryfile.mrimg thing. Then, if Drive #1
decides to stop working some day, we use the bare metal
recovery boot disc, boot up, and finish the restore.

Restore
temporaryfile.mrimg --- Drive #2

When that is finished, now the brand new hard drive
"Drive #2" you bought at the store, can take the
place of the defunct Drive #1, which now rests in
your rubbish pile.

If you clone a 500GB drive onto a second 500GB drive,
then 500GB of space is taken up. Your recovery plan
could use "clones" as its primary mechanism. But, it
isn't all that efficient.

Drive #1 --- Drive #2 can be used as a disaster recovery plan...
Is an inefficient means of doing so...

If the temporaryfile.mrimg is 67GB, and restores a 500GB
Drive #2, then that is more space efficient. I have images
of all my hard drives, stored on a 3TB drive. And I can do that,
because not all the drives are absolutely full of data. And
if you use compression on the images

temporaryfile.mrimg.7z
temporaryfile.mrimg.rar

then that tends to save more space than the compression
option in Macrium would. I do my compression steps
(if used, scenario dependent), on a second computer.
This separates the compression step, from the backup
step. Compression is so computationally difficult, it
costs me $1 of electricity, to compress all the mrimg
files on my 3TB drive. And it takes all day. It used
to take all week, until I put a machine together just
for the purpose of doing compression a bit faster.
That's my "test machine", which tests stuff when
I'm not compressing. For example, I boot the "test machine"
to run the Win10 Insider OS occasionally.

Paul

Art Todesco wrote on 10/06/2015 9:35 AM:

One other thing, in my mind, image and clone are the same thing. What's
the difference? I know clone is usually used when you want to put in an
SSD. You clone the original, write it to the SSD and then physically
swap out the original drive for the new SSD. I want to just have a good
image or clone of my c SSD so that if I get attacked by a virus or bad
adware, as I did earlier this year, I can revert back to the last
backup. To me, after reading Macrium's text, both should work, but
then, why have the option?

"Cloning copies the complete contents of one drive—the files, the
partition tables and the master boot record—to another: a simple, direct
duplicate. Imaging copies all of that to a single, very large file on
another drive. You can then restore the image back onto the existing
drive or onto a new one.


Typically, people use these techniques to back up the drive, or when
upgrading to a larger or faster drive. Both techniques will work for
each of these chores. But imaging usually makes more sense for a backup,
while cloning is the easiest choice for drive upgrades. "


--
...winston
msft mvp windows experience

On 10/6/2015 2:03 PM, . . .winston wrote:
Art Todesco wrote on 10/06/2015 9:35 AM:

One other thing, in my mind, image and clone are the same thing. What's
the difference? I know clone is usually used when you want to put in an
SSD. You clone the original, write it to the SSD and then physically
swap out the original drive for the new SSD. I want to just have a good
image or clone of my c SSD so that if I get attacked by a virus or bad
adware, as I did earlier this year, I can revert back to the last
backup. To me, after reading Macrium's text, both should work, but
then, why have the option?

"Cloning copies the complete contents of one drive—the files, the
partition tables and the master boot record—to another: a simple, direct
duplicate. Imaging copies all of that to a single, very large file on
another drive. You can then restore the image back onto the existing
drive or onto a new one.


Typically, people use these techniques to back up the drive, or when
upgrading to a larger or faster drive. Both techniques will work for
each of these chores. But imaging usually makes more sense for a backup,
while cloning is the easiest choice for drive upgrades. "

Thanks again ... I figured it was something like that. I redid the
backup, shutting off compression, however, it still came out with a
rather substantial difference. The 68G from the SSD made a 46G file on
the backup drive. BTW, I also used the option to verify the saved data
and of course, as expected, took much longer. Is this difference in size
just the overhead of each original file now being, basically eliminated?
To me, the difference still seems large.