Macrium Reflect image question - dedicated drive?

f14tomcat · 08 Jan 2019

dictum said:

I get it..so you create an image, it's not an ISO image but in Macrium Reflect format and you still have to actually recover the machine via some other mechanism to get the the prompt or to some preloaded environment to access ME image.

Let's say I suffer catastrophic operating system failure, major files deleted.. okay, I boot off the Win10 PE flash I have. Then what?

You then restore the latest backup image from the external drive, it will then re-boot, and you're back up and running. With everything exactly the way it was at the time the backup was done.

Every step, with examples, is in the Tenforums tutorial I posted previously.

Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect | Tutorials

dictum · 08 Jan 2019

okay, so the first critical one-time step is to Create Rescue Media

f14tomcat · 08 Jan 2019

dictum said:

okay, so the first critical one-time step is to Create Rescue Media

Make a Rescue thumb drive.

And test it by booting from it (just like booting Kyhi's Rescue...same procedure, different results). Also not a bad idea to add the Rescue Environment to the Boot Menu, but that's optional. Your choice.

Compumind · 09 Jan 2019

Hmm...

Here's the way that I do it:

Simple strategy. Everything is in duplicate.

2 HDD's, 2 USB Flash Drives for Bootable Rescue Media (tested.)

Complete images are made every other day, email and other important files backed up daily.
I have a lot of extra storage lying around, beside my NAS.

These are boilerplate images made to be restored to dissimilar hardware, just in case.
The image files are also able to be browsed and files pulled off if need be.

FWIW

f14tomcat · 09 Jan 2019

dictum said:

okay, so the first critical one-time step is to Create Rescue Media

f14tomcat said:

Make a Rescue thumb drive.

And test it by booting from it (just like booting Kyhi's Rescue...same procedure, different results). Also not a bad idea to add the Rescue Environment to the Boot Menu, but that's optional. Your choice.

@dictum
How's it going with these steps? Any progress?

dictum · 10 Jan 2019

How big of a USB flash drive do I need to make this Macrium Reflect recovery image?

I have two, one is 16GB and the other is 32GB. I noticed they rapidly went down in price. So I can get another one if I have to.

One holds Win10 Preloaded environment I got off this disk (the 16GB model) and the 32 holds Windows 10 install image I downloaded. My guess is, I won't use the latter again so 32GB is fit for this project.

Steve C · 10 Jan 2019

f14tomcat said:

And you are correct....if you don't have some bootable media for Rescue/Restore, the backup images are basically useless. It's a 2 way street. Macrium backup to create, Rescue Media to restore.

That's not entirely true. You can mount any partition in a Reflect image file as as a virtual disk drive and then recover any files/folders from the image. I've found this a useful feature sometimes when I accidentally deleted a file.

Steve C · 10 Jan 2019

dictum said:

The other thing that I wonder about, Macrium Reflect image process recovers the operating system but of course not your personal files in ~/Documents that can be significantly larger than 17GB. So the point of the image is to boot an operating system and recover it. And deal with the data later.

I hardly ever suffer data loss. Usually the damage is on the operating system level, or the EFI partition and such.

You can configure Reflect to backup your user files too. I schedule two backups - one of the system partitions to an internal drive and another of the complete system & data to an external drive.

Steve C · 10 Jan 2019

Some further tips not mentioned above

Some people use Reflect to clone their system to a spare drive in order to have a backup drive immediately available to boot
The Reflect feature viBoot van be used to boot from a Reflect image to confirm you have a viable backup

Reflect is an excellent and very well supported product. I wouldn't now use anything else having tried various alternatives (certainly not anything from Acronis)

f14tomcat · 10 Jan 2019

Steve C said:

That's not entirely true. You can mount any partition in a Reflect image file as as a virtual disk drive and then recover any files/folders from the image. I've found this a useful feature sometimes when I accidentally deleted a file.

As a System Restore, it is entirely true. It was that functionality we were discussing, and the rationale for having the Rescue Media. Mounting it for cherry picking files is a great side benefit, and I use it for that, also. But the main concept and purpose of the Macrium Backup/Restore, is just that....backup and be able to restore the system.