Solved Macrium perhaps not what I'm looking for...or is it?

[Duncs]

When I read the posts about Macrium Reflect, I thought it was the answer to my prayers. What I wanted was a way to backup my C: drive, and use that backup to restore my system to this state when required.

I was looking to install Windows 7, then install all the basic applications / drivers that I need, so that if I have to restore the system I can hit the ground running, without having to root out CD's, download drivers, install updates etc.

But, and unless I have misread the comments about it, Reflect is not "Backup Software". So, from this, can I take this to mean that I cannot create the situation I've listed above? Or, as I say, am I missing something?

Duncs

 

[MilesAhead]

It's fine for what you want to do. I would make a couple of images on a couple of different drives as insurance if you want to keep the same image as your restore image for a long time. In fact I know a guy on another forum who restores the Macrium image to a HD in a docking station. Then he puts the drive in a drawer. If his system fails, he pops the backup HD in and boots. No boot CD restore. It's already been done. But he's a docking station aficionado. He does everything with them.

 

[SIW2]

What I wanted was a way to backup my C: drive, and use that backup to restore my system to this state when required.

Yes, that is what macrium and similar are for. There is another imaging program which is completely free. It is my top recommendation for a free solution,

Local download

Free Download AOMEI Backupper: Windows Backup & Cloning Software

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

I don't know why anyone would say Macrium Reflect isn't backup software unless it's because it doesn't do so automatically and continuously. Otherwise, it will do exactly what you want. It works best when your C: drive or partition only has the OS and program files on it and it isn't used for data storage as well although it still will work if everything is on drive or partition.

I have Win 7 and my program files on my C: drive, a 128GB SSD (I'm using only 56 GB). I make an image of the C: drive once a week and just before making any changes to the system, such as adding a new program or running an update. With the SSD, it takes me only a hair less than 10 minutes to make the image and verify it. I don't even have to babysit the process; I just start it and skip to my loo, snag a snack or drink, whatever. I have restored my C: drive several times and find it is more reliable than using System Restore (in fact, I have disabled System Restore).

While one can use an image to backup data (and most people prefer to), I prefer to clone my data drive (imaging and cloning each have their own pros and cons) since I have a 3.5" hot swap bay I plug the backup HDD into. I can access the backed up data easily and, if a data HDD suffers a fatality, I can just disconnect the deceased HDD and plug in a back up HDD (I always make two clones for each data drive) and keep chugging along until I get and install a replacement drive.

 

[MilesAhead]

Also you can find more at thefreecountry.com: Free Programmers' Resources, Free Webmasters' Resources, Free Security Resources

 

[Duncs]

It looks as though I've misunderstood the comments I've read.

I'll have a go at creating an image. I'm looking at possibly creating a system restore partition on the C: drive, as well as an image on a DVD and then an additional drive...can't be too careful!

Thanks for the help.

Duncs

 

[whs]

I use free Macrium since several years and never had a situation where I could not recover my system. I also use it to transfer systems to new disks - e.g. SSDs.

Here is a tutorial that might help you get started. And download the WinPE ISO from my Skydrive and burn it to CD. That will save you a couple of hours creating it yourself. You need the WinPE CD to get the recovery process started. You can also use it to make images - in case that you do not want to install Macrium on your system (which I would recommend though).

 

[MilesAhead]

If you are going to keep this image as standard for a length of time, almost like a slipstream setup, then I'd recommend a couple of external drives. The docking station internal drive setup is a money saver now that drive prices have come back down to earth. The bare HD usually outperforms externals and is much cheaper so that the docking station pays for itself.

You can get a plastic stack of drawers in Walmart for about $10 to store 1/2 dozen bare drives in. It's very cool. I had USB 3.0 docking stations for both my desktop machines. Plus you can leave a drive in the dock as a data drive. Not to mention an SSD for fast video muxing, if you're into video conversion stuff.

 

[whs]

It looks as though I've misunderstood the comments I've read.

I'll have a go at creating an image. I'm looking at possibly creating a system restore partition on the C: drive, as well as an image on a DVD and then an additional drive...can't be too careful!

Thanks for the help.

Duncs

1. You can create a partition on the same physical drive as your C partition. But that defeats the purpose of images. What do you do when that physical drive fails.

2. Macrium images on DVDs are possible but not recommended. Because of the image size you need a lot of DVDs which is messy and the recovery from DVDs is painful. The best is to use an external USB attached disk.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...In fact I know a guy on another forum who restores the Macrium image to a HD in a docking station. Then he puts the drive in a drawer. If his system fails, he pops the backup HD in and boots. No boot CD restore. It's already been done. But he's a docking station aficionado. He does everything with them.

I had to laugh at that because that is pretty much what I do, especially the parts in bold. I prefer restoring my system back to the installed drive, either using a restoration CD, a USB stick (I recently made some for my two machines) or Macrium Reflect's ability to restore internally (I have the Pro version) during boot up.

Where I do use the two docks I have installed in my desktop machine (one 3.5" and one 2.5") is to backup my data drives.



When imaging my boot drive I save it to a folder on my main data drive and it gets backed up when I backup the data drive. I clone the data drive to a drive plugged into the dock, then, when finished, I take the backup drive out of the dock and literally put it in a drawer.



If the data drive should die, I can stick one of the backup drives into the dock and use it until I get and install a replacement data drive.

The only possible problem with leaving a drive in a dock is cooling. Docks like mine have no means of cooling the HDD. Fortunately, my drives, when in the docks, run only 1°C over the ones inside the computer. There are docks, however, that do have provisions for cooling. Servers use them.

 

[whs]

You can get a plastic stack of drawers in Walmart for about $10 to store 1/2 dozen bare drives in. It's very cool. I had USB 3.0 docking stations for both my desktop machines. Plus you can leave a drive in the dock as a data drive. Not to mention an SSD for fast video muxing, if you're into video conversion stuff.

MA, you happen to have a link for such a docking station - sounds interesting but I have not seen one yet.

 

[MilesAhead]

You can get a plastic stack of drawers in Walmart for about $10 to store 1/2 dozen bare drives in. It's very cool. I had USB 3.0 docking stations for both my desktop machines. Plus you can leave a drive in the dock as a data drive. Not to mention an SSD for fast video muxing, if you're into video conversion stuff.

MA, you happen to have a link for such a docking station - sounds interesting but I have not seen one yet.

The USB 3.0 docks I had were SIIG that worked with both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. They were expensive as USB 3.0 was new when I got them. Around $50 ea. Now I'm told it's perfected such that the $20 and under docks work fine. The SSD I used was a Kingston that was probably going extinct. I got a good deal on Egg. I think it was a 90 GB SSD for about $70.

edit: the USB 3.0 did not max out the sequential read/write speeds of the SSD. But the drive still got great random read/write. So for muxing video with source and destination on the SSD, it kicked ass.

 

[SIW2]

Did you have that pink foam rubber thing specially made?

What gives with the gloves? I do very little imaging compared to you lot, not for myself anyway. I do a lot of testing of those kind of programs, however.

...In fact I know a guy on another forum who restores the Macrium image to a HD in a docking station. Then he puts the drive in a drawer. If his system fails, he pops the backup HD in and boots. No boot CD restore. It's already been done. But he's a docking station aficionado. He does everything with them.

I had to laugh at that because that is pretty much what I do, especially the parts in bold. I prefer restoring my system back to the installed drive, either using a restoration CD, a USB stick (I recently made some for my two machines) or Macrium Reflect's ability to restore internally (I have the Pro version) during boot up.

Where I do use the two docks I have installed in my desktop machine (one 3.5" and one 2.5") is to backup my data drives.

View attachment 291594

When imaging my boot drive I save it to a folder on my main data drive and it gets backed up when I backup the data drive. I clone the data drive to a drive plugged into the dock, then, when finished, I take the backup drive out of the dock and literally put it in a drawer.

View attachment 291593

If the data drive should die, I can stick one of the backup drives into the dock and use it until I get and install a replacement data drive.

The only possible problem with leaving a drive in a dock is cooling. Docks like mine have no means of cooling the HDD. Fortunately, my drives, when in the docks, run only 1°C over the ones inside the computer. There are docks, however, that do have provisions for cooling. Servers use them.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Did you have that pink foam rubber thing specially made?

What gives with the gloves? I do very little imaging compared to you lot, not for myself anyway. I do a lot of testing of those kind of programs, however.

No, I bought it. They are designed to fit in standard filing cabinet drawers. It wasn't cheap, either, but it's made of anti-static foam so I don't have to store the HDDs in the anti-static sleeves; that makes handling far more convenient, easpeially since I also don't have to juggle them HDDs to see find the one I want. The 18 holer like what I have can be bought here and a 24 holer here (sounds like I'm referring to super outhouses). I originally ordered the 18 holer but the company I bought it from (the HenFruit company was out at the time) ran out after I had made the order. They offered to let me have the 24 holer for the same price as the 18 holer or I could cancel the order. Needless to say, I was all over the 24 holer offer like stink on skunk. It was too big for the drawer I was going to put it in but a minute with a hand saw fixed that minor detail.

The black thingies in some of the holes are spacers I made from some additional anti-static foam I bought so I can conveniently store 2.5" HDDs as well as 3.5".

The anti-static gloves are because I'm such a shocking person. All seriousness aside, I have a huge problem with static electricity in my house because of the vinyl floor tiles and the dry climate I live in; winters are especially bad. I can literally turn on some of my CFLs very briefly by touching a pull chain for the light switches. In fact, I have killed the electronics in a couple of CFLs while installing them. I've learned to be very religious about grounding myself before touching anything. I also pick up something metallic, such a key or a coin, and grounding myself through it to reduce the bite of the zap (I HATE! getting zapped). Even with the anti-static gloves, I first touch a pull chain that's close to my computer, then the computer case itself—I generally wear just one glove—before inserting or removing a HDD from a swap bay with the gloved hand.

 

[whs]

You can get a plastic stack of drawers in Walmart for about $10 to store 1/2 dozen bare drives in. It's very cool. I had USB 3.0 docking stations for both my desktop machines. Plus you can leave a drive in the dock as a data drive. Not to mention an SSD for fast video muxing, if you're into video conversion stuff.

MA, you happen to have a link for such a docking station - sounds interesting but I have not seen one yet.

The USB 3.0 docks I had were SIIG that worked with both 3.5" and 2.5" drives. They were expensive as USB 3.0 was new when I got them. Around $50 ea. Now I'm told it's perfected such that the $20 and under docks work fine. The SSD I used was a Kingston that was probably going extinct. I got a good deal on Egg. I think it was a 90 GB SSD for about $70.

edit: the USB 3.0 did not max out the sequential read/write speeds of the SSD. But the drive still got great random read/write. So for muxing video with source and destination on the SSD, it kicked ass.

Thanks for the info. Will study the matter on the Egg.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Even faster than USB 3.0 external docks are some of the ones that connect via e-SATA, depending on if they run at SATA 2.0 or SATA 3.0 speeds. I have an older one that uses either USB 2.0 or e-SATA. On USB 2.0, it is as fast as a dead dog but on e-SATA, it sails along at a pretty fair clip. I haven't actually measured the speed but the dock on e-SATA is clearly much faster than USB but appears to be slower than my internal docks.

What I like about my internal docks is they use no electronics so each one is essentially a pass-through directly to a SATA 3.0 port on my HBA card and I don't have to horse around with cables and separate PSUs.

 

[SIW2]

I haven't seen those before. I have only got 3 drives so not much point. They look attractive in pink, though.

Pretty expensive for a bit of foam.

 

[whs]

Even faster than USB 3.0 external docks are some of the ones that connect via e-SATA, depending on if they run at SATA 2.0 or SATA 3.0 speeds. I have an older one that uses either USB 2.0 or e-SATA. On USB 2.0, it is as fast as a dead dog but on e-SATA, it sails along at a pretty fair clip. I haven't actually measured the speed but the dock on e-SATA is clearly much faster than USB but appears to be slower than my internal docks.

What I like about my internal docks is they use no electronics so each one is essentially a pass-through directly to a SATA 3.0 port on my HBA card and I don't have to horse around with cables and separate PSUs.

That is my experience too. Despite the better specs of USB3, my tests show that eSata is faster - e.g. for making an image which is 30GBs. And the comparison was done on the same PC, a Dell XPS 8300 with i7, 8GB of RAM, system on a Crucial M$ and an external 7200RPM HDD.

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

...Pretty expensive for a bit of foam.

View attachment 291614

True that! Still, for my needs, I felt the price was worth it.

I suspect a lot of hand labor goes into making them (they are made of several laminated layers) and I know for a fact that anti-static foam isn't cheap. In fact, there is a rather negative review on one of them carping about the price. Not only did the reviewer not purchase the "egg crate" (my term for lack of a better, more concise term), I suspect his free alternatives (which, for most people, aren't going to be as easy to obtain as he claims) aren't anti-static since new drives are normally shipped in an anti-static sleeve, negating the need for anti-static foam. I wanted anti-static foam so I wouldn't have to horse with anti-static sleeves. These "egg crates" are definitely a niche product.

 

[MilesAhead]

Even faster than USB 3.0 external docks are some of the ones that connect via e-SATA, depending on if they run at SATA 2.0 or SATA 3.0 speeds. I have an older one that uses either USB 2.0 or e-SATA. On USB 2.0, it is as fast as a dead dog but on e-SATA, it sails along at a pretty fair clip. I haven't actually measured the speed but the dock on e-SATA is clearly much faster than USB but appears to be slower than my internal docks.

What I like about my internal docks is they use no electronics so each one is essentially a pass-through directly to a SATA 3.0 port on my HBA card and I don't have to horse around with cables and separate PSUs.

Ask a rule of thumb benchmark I like to copy a file of some size. Like maybe a GB or 2. Also use Crystal Disk Mark. The SIIG claim 5 Gb/s max rating. CDM sequential read/write typically around 120+ MB/s if the internal in the dock is Sata III. For instance WD Caviar Black 1 TB. I guess the throughput isn't all that much higher in reality as I seem to remember the SSD only doing a bit better than that on sequential. But of course the random access was phenomenal.

Strangely enough when I plugged my Seagate 500 GB external USB 2.0 drive into the SIIG while waiting for the USB 3.0 docks to arrive, I got about a 15% increase in sequential throughput. Instead of large single file copies at about 24 MB/s they came in consistently at about 32 MB/s. Weird. But I'll take it.

This Laptop has one USB 3.0 port but I haven't copied a large file. Only USB 3.0 thing I have to plug into it is a USB 3.0 key drive from AData. So I can't really compare.