Question: Macrium Reflect background processes

pliskken said:

As I said, Macrium Reflcet is excellent, cant believe I used to make such slow and bloated system images with windows "back up and restore".

As both a long-term user of Windows' own built-in 'Create a system image' and a recent Macrium adopter I am, perhaps, in a unique position to make a comparison.

The main reason that a full image made by Windows is bloated compared to a Macrium full image is that the MS image includes the full pagefile.sys, swapfile.sys and hiberfil.sys, whereas Macrium doesn't (just 0-byte stubs, I understand). If you turn off hibernation and virtual memory before making an image the images are of comparable size. Only with Macrium's High compression option can you make a significantly smaller full image (and take significantly longer to do so).

And a note of caution on that. Macrium only seems to exclude the pagefile et. al. when it is run from the system it is imaging. If you boot from the Macrium PE on a usb and use that to image a PC you'll still include those files in full.

It's the differentials/incrementals where Macrium wins hands-down on speed - mainly because MS doesn't do them :)