New
#31
Okay I admit I had a bad external hard drive which I had to copy the image to the hard drive to restore thinking it was not the hard drive (that is how much confidence I have in this program) but had no problems restoring it to find out a bad hard drive. I even used this to find out that I had a bad USB hub. I am now using a newer external hard drive and new USB hub.
I've just voted (100%) because I have used Macrium in the past. All I will say is that none of the programs I've used have ever 'failed me' and that includes Windows Backup and Restore. As long as the image file is correctly created and stored then I have never had any doubts over being able to recover it, even from the big names whose offerings have become problematic for various reasons.
Backup and Restore has been 100% reliable for me in actually restoring an image. Where it fails is in actually seeing an image as being restorable. If you want to keep multiple images for different machines on the one ext. drive, then you have to jump through hoops renaming the WindowsImageBackup folder each time. It's true that each machine has it's own subfolder there named as the PC's name, but save a W7 machine image to a WindowsImageBackup already containing W10 images and W10's restore will no longer find it's own images.
I make Macrium FULL IMAGE backups monthly to an external. The only I have seen it fail is when the internal or external drive is failing.
I install it and encourge it's use too all of my clients.
I always unplug external after backup as well. NO auto backups to a constantly plugged in external.
I do backups almost everyday because I experiment with software, drivers update, settings tweaks and mess my computer up quite often.
No issues to date restoring Images.
A second follow on question, does anyone have experience with Image Guard (if you bought) protecting your backups.
The members answering this poll would likely not get something like ransomware but if you did and you are willing to share your experience, did MR Image Guard perform as advertised? I know Image Guard won't let Windows delete a protected file, Windows isn't Malware.
I do restores almost every day because I experiment with software, particularly installing things or tweaking settings that people are having trouble with on these boards. That's what my test machine is for, after all - so I don't have to "mess my computer up quite often" on my main machine. When done, I restore back to a pristine system ready for the next customer.
Backups are once a month, after Patch Tuesday, so I have up to date images for all my machines.