Image your system with free Macrium

I have 2 OS's on One hard drive...win 7 and win 10, on Disk 1. The win 7 bkup is shown as drive H as I mentioned along with the jpg of my DM. Keep in mind, I no longer want to install that backup image of Win 7, just copy some old files from it. But, like i said earlier, when i tried to open some of those files, it comes up empty...so did i make a bad image at that time or is there a flaw with the free version of Macruim?

I am a frequent user of Macrium on Windows 10. I have about 21 gb of used space on a 40gb OS partition. MY image backups end up around 12-13 gb in size.

I'm helping a friend with Windows 7 ultimate. The used space is approximately 37 gb. Instead of one .mring image backup, we ended up with 6 .mring files

I just did it the way I always do with Win 10, so is this correct for Win 7? If so, how do you do a restore?

kitpzyxmsir said:

I am a frequent user of Macrium on Windows 10. I have about 21 gb of used space on a 40gb OS partition. MY image backups end up around 12-13 gb in size.

I'm helping a friend with Windows 7 ultimate. The used space is approximately 37 gb. Instead of one .mring image backup, we ended up with 6 .mring files

I just did it the way I always do with Win 10, so is this correct for Win 7? If so, how do you do a restore?

Nothing to do with Win7.

Your target partition must be formatted as FAT32, hence maximum file size of 4GB, and Macrium Reflect breaks up the output image into 4GB segments.

If you convert it to NTFS then the MRIMG files will be just single large files. Use Minitool Partition Wizard Free to easily convert from FAT32 to NTFS.

dsperber said:

Nothing to do with Win7.

Your target partition must be formatted as FAT32, hence maximum file size of 4GB, and Macrium Reflect breaks up the output image into 4GB segments.

Yes. When I saw the size of the backups, something blinked in the back of my mind, but it threw me.

dsperber said:

If you convert it to NTFS then the MRIMG files will be just single large files. Use Minitool Partition Wizard Free to easily convert from FAT32 to NTFS.

SIW2 said:

Pick up the 00.mrimg to restore - the rest is automatic.

So, I have 2 options? I can just select 00.mrimg to restore and the rest will automatically fall in place? Or do the file system conversion.

Which one would you guys do. I know there are future benefits to NTFS beyond what I'm trying to do now, but it's not my machine (if it was mine, I would definitely convert) and I dont want to take any chances if there is any risk

Regardless, I can definitely like the looks of that partition tool. Thanks for that.

BTW, do you use their MiniTool ShadowMaker Free 1.0? How does it compare to Macrium?

kitpzyxmsir said:

So, I have 2 options? I can just select 00.mrimg to restore and the rest will automatically fall in place? Or do the file system conversion.

Two separate issues.

To avoid new similarly fragmented image backups out of Macrium Reflect in the future, you need to target your backups to a partition which is NTFS, not FAT32. So the smartest thing to do is simply to continue to use this partition exactly as you've got things currently set up, but use Partition Wizard to change it from FAT32 to NTFS. You lose no existing data folder/files, you only change the file system going forward to be NTFS. So your next Macrium image will be a single large file.

As far as this one particular existing fragmented image, Macrium Reflect "restore" can handle that type of multi-part structure, no matter whether it's on a FAT32 or NTFS partition. So even after you convert the partition to NTFS you can still make use of this first fragmented multi-part image file.

Or, you can just flush this first image file and all of its pieces, and just re-create a new single-file image after you've converted the partition to NTFS.

Once you've got the target backup partition in NTFS format, any image backups to create in the future (either manually created on-demand, or generated regularly and automatically say once or twice a week, which you can configure to say preserve the most recent 6 or so image files and automatically delete any generation 7 or older versions when the next newest one gets created) will be single file structure. It won't be too many weeks before you have a collection that is self-maintaining say at 6 versions.

So I wouldn't spend a second worrying about this first existing multi-segment image file. Just delete it, recreate a new one, and write the whole thing off to learning experience.