Macrium Reflect Pro

huffman said:

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NOTE it say it "will compress to a virtual FAT32 drive". I am not sure exactly what this means and what I would get if I had to restore it. I would appreciate it if someone can enlighten me on this.
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this is for a file & folder backup, not an image. you can restore individual files or folders to their original locations en-mass, or you can mount the backup as if it were a real fat32 hard disk with it's own unique drive letter, and copy the files individually using the normal windows copy/move from there to wherever you wanted. this is most useful for your data and documents, program installers, images, music, videos etc that are not protected system files. it appears to be a fat32 disk, so does not retain the extended file & folder attributes of ntfs if the original backed up location was ntfs. using this is like copying files to a fat32 disk from an ntfs disk and later back again, with the same loss of security info. it is limited, but will be smaller than an entire image as you can set it to only back up the items you change regularly. attached below is my file and folder backup of my D: drive's backup folder, mounted as drive M:, along with it's 'drive' properties

the 'used' space corresponds to the backup file size, where the extra free space comes from i don't know...you can't copy TO it, it appears to be right protected.

the other option produces an image of the entire disk or partition that can be used to restore the entire disk in one shot, along with the system files, boot items, and security permissions that the file & folder backup cannot. it sets your system back to exactly like it was at the time of backup. it too can be mounted as if it were a hard disk and you can use the std. windows utilities to copy individual files in that mode it cannot restore locked system files. it will appear formatted as whatever format the original source disk was formatted in, ie. in my case, ntfs. & retain all the extended attributes and security of the original source.

the compression depends on what you are backing up, images of a 100gb disk with a lot of unused space will compress more than images with less unused space as macrium effectively does not back up the free space, page file, hyberfile; it just backs up the actually used bits. erased data in erased free sectors is not backed up or restored.

you can however set it to do a bit by bit backup which will backup the free space, hyberfile, pagefile, recycle bin, remnants of erased files and erased mft entries, etc. as well. this will result in a larger image with less apparent compression. it's like a forensic copy, you could use recovery tools to recover erased files & look at old un-overwritten data in erased disk sectors.

You can also recover individual file from the image backup by right clicking on the image and selecting explore. It mounts the image and assigns a drive letter to it and opens it with explorer. You can then copy any file you want.

1. You only need to use the explore option if you want to restore part of the file backup.
2. The compression won't show on the properties as it's not Windows compression.
3. With the explore option check the box will assign a drive letter and open Windows Explorer on the drive.
4. Rescue disks always assign new drive letters. You can usually Id the one you want from the partition name and the size. The folder backup doesn't need to be in the rescue disk. Only the image restore needs to be done from the rescue disk because you can't restore an image to an active system. The folder restore can be done from within Windows.

Hope this helps. please come back if you have further questions

it seems like you might benefit from reading macrium's on line tutorials <-linky

the xplore backup image picture in your last post allows you to select which backup from many (you have only one so far) you wish to explore. it will when ok'd allow you to select a drive letter from those not yet in use, and it will mount the back up as if it were a hard disk. you can then copy files from it as you would from any real hard disk. when done you should use the menu option to detach the image.

windows can wind up with multiple hard disk partitions, not necessarily in alphabetical order on their assigned drive letters. sounds like you need a more intense understanding of partitioning, and how windows boots from them. in general, you need to restore a partition image to the same partition it came from originally.

edited:
i see kado posted as i was typing this. GMTA, so there is some overlap.