Macrium Reflect Free making multiple images?

RolandJS said:

One advantage of having C & D partitions on one drive, when I purchased twin HDs, one was C, the other was D, it was easy to clone D-partition, or restore D-partition image, onto its new home, the 2nd HD. I guess one can also do the reverse.

You can, and that is the fastest way to transfer data to replacement drives but, same as imaging, cloning is an inefficient way to backup data drives/partitions (unlike OS and program files, which must be imaged or cloned to work). Both imaging and cloning data for backups requires too much space and takes way too long to do. A folder/file syncing program, such as FreeFileSync, is much more efficient and will result in a backup that is essentially a clone of source drive/partition. When set to mirror mode (not quite the same as RAID 1, btw, which I do not recommend for backups), a folder/file syncing program will compare a source with a destination and then copy and delete files as necessary to make the two essentially identical without altering the source. Since only folders and files that have changed are involved, it takes considerable less time to update a backup than cloning and imaging, which require all data to be dealt with every time a backup is updated.

ignatzatsonic said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

In your example of a 100GB partition on a HDD (assuming that is the formatted size) with only 60GB being used, to have 10% headroom on a destination partition, it would need to be at least 67GB formatted space. It never hurts to have more room for future expansion, however.[/I]

I wonder how that intelligent sector thing works in "real life", you should pardon the expression.

Ever had to rely on it working as advertised?

Like restoring a 100 GB partition, with 60 occupied, to an 80 GB disk?

I'm just curious. Offhand, I can't recall anyone on this forum who has done it--or attempted it.

Maybe it's flawless, but I rarely look at Macrium forums where that might be discussed.

The Intelligent Sector thing is a default setting so I strongly suspect everyone here who uses Macrium Reflect has used it, whether they realized it or not, including you. I've never had a problem with it in the two years or so I've been using Macrium Reflect.

ignatzatsonic said:

Lady Fitzgerald said:

I've never had a problem with it in the two years or so I've been using Macrium Reflect.

Nor have I.

But I know of no one who has attempted (successfully or not) a restore to a drive that was noticeably smaller than the source partition.

Do you?

Yup! Me! All seriousness aside (?), I did a test sometime back where I restored an image of data I planted on a spare 500GB HDD (I don't remember how big the data was) to a 160GB HDD. It worked just fine.

GokAy said:

I use Acronis TI 2010 Home:

The clone function can be done to a smaller drive as long as used space is smaller than destination. (500GB SSD with 100GB used space cloned to 250GB HDD). I guess it can perform the regular restore function to smaller drive as well.

The same is true of Macrium Reflect for both cloning and image restoration (I have done both).

LadyF, you're right as rain concerning data imaging. However in the context of moving data partition from one location to another location is one good way to go. I average partition imaging once monthly, or maybe every 2-3 weeks. Resplendence has a great undelete program that I use on two computers.