Once I had successfully completed that first Macrium Reflect backup it completely changed my whole attitude toward how I run my computer with the strengthened confidence that 3 complete sets of Image Backups on 3 different inert disks can inspire.
~Maxx~
Yes indeed, many hours of work can be lost to the stroke of a key!!
Although not a pro by any means, I have been using a computer for many years for many things, and due to my busy schedule, Backups are often let go, (you know, Ill get to it later). The last crash with Vista was the last straw.
I lost the desktop first and couldn't get it back, so I chose to repair with data and lost everything I had! months and months of work! oh yes, most of it was backed up, but not current!
That's when I decided to give Macrium a try and as soon as I re-formatted, it's one of the first programs I loaded!
My story is much the same with Vista System Restore failing 4 times in a row! It took me nearly 100 hours to reconstruct the Factory Image into what I was using at the time. Just 3 weeks after I found Macrium Reflect the computer crashed again, but this time I was prepared and Macrium Reflect had it up and running perfectly as though nothing had happened in just a few short minutes!
~Maxx~
Then, you should consider looking into the purchased version. It provides the option of writing the rescue boot info to your hard drive -- when then allows you to do restore without needing a rescue CD. This can come in very handy when you either (1) do not have the CD handy, or (2) have a machine that does not have an optical drive.
Mark, I never saw that option and how is that supposed to work when your harddrive dies? Are you talking about writing the .iso to your harddrive which you then can e.g. transfer to a USB stick? You need some type of "external" device to start the recovery process. I would appreciate if you pointed me to the relevant paragraph on their website.It provides the option of writing the rescue boot info to your hard drive
WHS, a quick question, I have Macrium set to run at log on, is it better to leave the computer alone while it's making an image? It makes me nervous running other tasks while it is making it's image.
Thanks
Bret
It will be quicker if you don't attempt to do anything else while it's imaging.
BTW Paragon makes differential drive images - not incremental.
A differential image contains all the changes since the first full image.
You need either the first full image to restore to the time that was made, or the first full image any one differential to restore to the time that differential was made.
Incrementals include the changes only since the last incremental - not all the changes since the first full image.
The Macrium Bartpe plugin ( now called pebuilder) works in pe2 and pe3.
This is my pe3 media :
The macrium boot menu option adds an entry to boot a pe2 .wim including the macrium program from the hard drive .
Similar to the option to boot windows winre.wim from the HD - you will see that on the advanced boot menu, if you have the 100mb system partition.
You can add any .wim to the regular boot menu very easily.
You can also use an F key to boot any .wim from the HD, but that's a bit fiddly for beginners.
The purpose of the boot menu option is convenience - you may not have external boot media ( e.g. cd) with you.
The downside is it depends on bcd working - so is not a proper substitute for external bootable recovery media.
I hide Macrium when it is imaging and run other tasks on Duo and Quad cores. Never had a problem.
My suggestion: Instead of scheduling it at boot time I suggest to schedule it on a day (or every day of the week) at a certain time. And check the box on the bottom of the little window saying:" If missed, run at next boot". Then it does not come up when you reboot during the day - e.g. because updates were installed.
It's easy of course to make a recovery boot USB to cover the lack of optical drive.
I used to do a lot of international travelling with work and if I was doing it now one of the very small portable HDDs would have been essential baggage - size of a pack of cards! Put images & lots of other documents etc. But it would be nice to use it as a boot recovery device for both Macrium (including linux boot) and Windows imaging as well.
Well, I tried my Macrium test file today, finally!
I'm imaging to a Iomega eGo 500GB portable HDD, so I made a little picture folder and placed on my second internal HDD, made an image, deleted some of the pictures and rebooted with the rescue disk.
All worked fine with the Linux image recovery disc, but I wasn't able to locate the Iomega drive in the drive tree! (this is a USB 3.0 drive and I recently installed a new 3.0 external card on the PC for it)
I went back through my image steps from the beginning, to make sure I was doing everything correctly, Then it dawned on me to switch USB ports this time. So I switched the Iomega drive to a 2.0 port in the front of the PC and wala! it worked! I restored the pictures I had deleted!
I don't understand why the Iomega drive isn't recognized when plugged into the 3.0 card? The drive performs and functions perfectly for imaging,transferring and reading data when attached to the 3.0 card? Oh well, at least I have a work around.
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