4TB Drive Backup and Restore Compatibility?

ignatzatsonic said:

Yeah, you've got it wrong.

You DON'T boot from the drive containing the images. You boot from the rescue CD disk you make with Macrium. It's an ordinary CD burn like you've probably done many times. I think you can use a USB stick as the rescue media if your PC can boot from USB. I've never tried it and just use CDs.

Your image files would be stored on your data drive, just like any other data file. The image files would presumably be backed up, just like any other data file.

If you have a "System Reserved" partition, you must make a Macrium image of it as well as C. It contains your boot files and Windows won't boot without it. You could make a single image file containing both System Reserved and C or you could make separate image files of each. I don't have a System Reserved, so I just image C.

To recover from a bad situation, you'd boot from the rescue disk, which lands you in an interface. You navigate in that interface to locate the previously made image file. You then issue commands in the interface to restore that image file to your desired destination.

You can make a Linux recovery disk or a WinPE recovery disk. The latter is much preferred. Both are made within Macrium itself. You CAN'T restore an image file if this recovery disk does not boot. So you must test it after making it.

The Linux based disc would land you in a text-based interface, somewhat slow and cryptic.

The WinPE based disc lands you in the very same Macrium interface you would see if you opened Macrium from your hard drive. Full graphics, navigated by mouse and keyboard. Quick and easily understood.

Here's an example with my PC.

I have 3 internal drives, each with a single partition.

C, an SSD containing Windows and all applications.

D, an HDD containing all of my data

E, a 3 TB GPT disc containing backups of both C and D.

So: I make image files of C and store them on D. Those image files get backed up to E, just like any other bit of data.

My FreeFileSync data backups copy 100% of what is on D to E, in ordinary form--no images, no compression, just like a drag and drop. Run daily or more often; typically takes 50 or 60 seconds.

If I have a bad Windows crash and need to restore an image of C, I boot from my burned WinPE recovery disk made with Macrium. I navigate to D, find my original image file, and restore it to C. I could just as easily navigate to the backed up image file on E and restore it to C.

Macrium image files have an mrimg extension. Each single file is a compressed representation of the partitions contained in the image. An image file could contain 1 or more partitions. All of mine contain just 1 partition. I make an image file every month and keep the 2 most recent files. Each file is roughly 40% of the size of the occupied space of the partitions it represents--my C drive has about 35 GB occupied and the last image I made of it was about 14 GB in size.

Macrium lets you drill into an image file (without restoring it) with an Explorer type interface and recover individual files if needed, but I never use that function.

You can also use Macrium to "clone" your operating system to another drive--as you might if you bought a new hard drive and wanted to move Windows to it. This is NOT a backup, but is instead a real-time operation. You could also use the imaging capability (rather than cloning) to move Windows to a new hard drive.

See attached pic of my Windows Disk Management.

Wow thank you so much for all this :). You cleared up any and all questions I have.

I ended up going with a simple external 3tb drive (wd mybook) to do data and macrium backup on. It's speeds are pretty decent too. Some 150MB/s sequential read/write, compared to my old backup drive of about 25-40MB/s.
My computer and BIOS recognize the drive in its full capacity after a gpt format. And so far it's working great.
I have yet to get into macrium, but I'll follow your advice and guides here on sevenforums and hopefully do it this weekend if I have time.
Thank you everyone :)