Imaging via MR Rescue Media not skipping pagefile & hiberfil

I'm not sure what MR is however the only thing that comes to mind is to disable hibernation and pagefile before doing the backup because disabling them gets rid of those files. I never keep hibernation enabled. Disable The Page File And Hibernation - Can You Get More Space Or Speed From Your SSD?

@townsbg
Oops, MR = Macrium Reflect. OP updated.

I probably would have done as you suggest if it hadn't explicitly indicated it would skip them. I only needed to make a few temporary images so it's not worth special effort, and disabling hibernation isn't an option in this particular case.

@ignatzatsonic

I've never used MR before. I initially noticed "something was amiss" because the size of the first image was the same as the used space on C:. I mounted the image and both files were there. It's significant because the files are 24 & 32 GB (default settings). I tried medium compression the second time around and the files were still stored, but at least the image was significantly smaller (13GB vs 70GB) and the process was faster.

I guess I'll register on MR forums. I hate making new accounts, but if nothing else it should be reported in case it's a bug.

I assume you're not inquiring after their contents.

Their sizes are 24 & 32 GB, and they're not sparse files or such. The proof is in the backup: an uncompressed image of the disk (C: and Reserved) is ~70GB, and C: has ~70GB used.

On the Macrium Forum they say the hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys are empty in the image file, if it is created while running Windows.
I don't believe this.
I browsed a MR image in Windows, copied the pagefile to a temp folder, opened it with notepad, and i see data in the file.

There is a way to exclude files from being included in an image created while running Windows.
It requires adding some registry keys.
If anyone wants to see the reg keys, let me know and i'll post it.

I just added keys to exclude these files and created an image.
When i browse that image, the files are not there, and the mounted image is several GB smaller than the drive i just imaged.

Here's a couple Macrium threads about this:
Macrium Support Forum - Hiberfil.sys and Pagefile.sys
Macrium Support Forum - Pagefile being included?

ignatzatsonic said:

Alpha:

I'm using Reflect Free 6.1.1225 and have always used default medium compression.

How did you find those files---with a DIR command?

I just ran dir /s pagefile.sys and found nothing within 3 different images I've made in the last month or so.

I have no idea what standard behavior is supposed to be--I've never checked before.

I don't use hibernation, so would not expect to find that file in an image. I do use a page file however.

I don't have a System Reserved, but I certainly wouldn't expect that to make a difference.

Did you have this issue in prior MR builds?

To see these files you would have to temporarily change your Explorer folder options to show hidden and protected files.

Thanks for the links. From the second link, this is a known issue for years it seems. Seems like that's my solution.

An empty file (nothing but zeroes) should compress quite spectacularly, so it's not a terrible solution I suppose. It could be the file you looked at just had a small "header" of data and the rest was empty. In any case I'm only interested in the Rescue Media, which despite the issue is pretty impressive. I'm kind of curious if those keys can affect the WinPE environment.

It's my understanding the PE environment can't use the reg keys, so the registry tweak will only work when creating the image while running Windows.

I could see enough in the pagefile with Notepad to know it's not just header info.
Most of it is unreadable, but some parts do display as readable text.