Windows 7 - Image your system with free Macrium

That's exactly what I was looking for. Thank You. I think I have a pretty good handle on it now. The only difference is that I intend to back up less frequently. I have all my important files in a truecrypt volume and a few others on dropbox. I have my laptop setup perfectly now and I know I don't have any malware. I will leave the backup the way it is unless I make major changes. If something goes wrong then I have a safe backup. Is this an okay philosophy?

Bigcitycat + others,
If you have a separate system reserved partition as the Windows OS partition the simplest and safest approach is to always include it in your Macrium image set. That is tick the 2 boxes. The system reserved partition is a tiny 100-200MB partition. Most of the time you don't need to restore it. You just select the OS part of the set to restore. But this way every image you make can immediately be transferred to a brand new HDD rather than searching around for the right little system reserved you made way back whenever.

I think whs that each case is different. You have to work out what is the best strategy for the way you work. I myself have lots of slowly changing data, mostly books, photos, music and videos on an external disk and a small amount of rapidly changing data on my local disk. In this case I find it best to use a file and folder backup on each of the sets of data as needed and an image backup of the windows partitions only after system changes.

Hi Guys

I've just downloaded Macrium free, as for the first time today windows imaging failed for me but have a few questions if someone one could be as so kind to answer for me.

1) How do I activate the auto verify.

2) I've put the boot media on dvd but would like to also have it on usb, can I add it to my recovery usb using Yumi Multiboot Usb or is there another process I should use.

3) Is each image I create stored independently ie wont be overwritten at any point by another image.

I'm liking the minimalistic look of the UI and am looking forward to seeing how the program compares to windows native imaging software

Thankyou

Danny

Each image is stored independently, but I always store each image in a new folder that is dated something like "Macrium-081911", so I know the date of the image.

I always verify manually directly from the menu.

Thanks ignatzatsonic

Is there an option to verify automatically I cant seem to find it.Any ideas on the boot media been on the Usb or the best way to achieve this.

Danny

Can't help you on auto-verify. You may be correct that there is no such control.

Re USB: imaging is so spooky and subject to breakdown and disappointment that I try to keep it as simple as possible and just use a boot CD.

Be SURE to verify that you can in fact boot from your CD and access the image file and all drives.

There is really no need for independent folders since the images are dated. Creating a new XML each time you go into a new folder is a lot of unnecessary work.

There is a verify option during recovery. USB booting is not available via free Macrium - but SIW2 did show a few ways on how to tweak that.

1. The autoverify can either be set in the defaults or for an individual backup by pressing the advanced options button on the final dialog screen.

2. If you allow the default naming you won't overwrite a previous image.

3. I'm not sure which version Macrium Free is but if it is version 5 it has the built in ability to produce a bootable WinPE ISO. If it is version 4 then you can use Yumi to boot the ISO. Also note that Yumi can boot Hirens CD which contains a mini XP environment with Macrium PE in it.