Image your system with free Macrium

mjf said:

Do we take the "copy" comment literally? If so then this could be causing strange behaviour. Have you actually imaged to one of your internal sata drives and restored?

I have a very similar system configuration to you and your imaging time to a USB2 to a 5400 RPM ext HDD seems reasonable. Remember that you can find a significant difference in time depending on how full your ext HDD is. If it is quite full you will writing to the inner tracks and it will definitely be slower.

For interest, I imaged 50 GB (source) yesterday to a USB3 on a 75% full HDD and it took 12 minutes.

Yes, I literally copied the mrimg file from the external 1TB to my internal 320GB secondary laptop drive. I believe I used the laptop's internal drive the recovery process would be faster than over USB2.0.

My laptop is a 18.4" Pavilion dv8, i5 M450, 6GB DDR3, Win7 Pro x64 SP1 and two 320GB 5400rpm hdds.

I created a another image and this time saved it to the internal secondary drive and going to perform a restore. I will delete the volume (c:) first before restoring (as to emulate a brand new drive) and report back the results.

I strongly recommend the use of Teracopy, available from
TeraCopy for Microsoft Windows - Code Sector

I used Windows standard copy to copy a set of Macrium *.mrimg files from an internal drive through USB2 to an external.
Macrium validated and rejected the copies, but validated the originals.
I confirmed independently with an MD5 checksum utility that there were discrepancies.

Since then I have always used the Free version of Teracopy,
confident in the knowledge that it will compute MD5 when being copied and then read back and recompute and warn upon problems.
It also has the great advantage that if copying a large number of files and it is forbidden access to one of them,
then unlike Windows copy which aborts all subsequent copying,
Teracopy will continue to copy what is possible and then present a list of what needs to be retried after fixing access restrictions.

Just finished the recovery from a image created by Macrium directly to the secondary drive and it took 1:42:32. Almost 2hrs long. Creating the same image took only 22mins.

*scratches head*

Using the free version at work it took us 3 hours to restore an 80GB partition over the network. We decided 3 hours was acceptable (not desired but acceptable). Then when we purchased the server version with redeploy the restore only took 20 minutes. I'm not sure if it was a network issue at the time since i don't personally monitor all the backup times but something increased the restore process.