Can Macrium restore an MS System Image?

spokey said:

So far the system is working.

Yes, your system looks sound. Renaming/moving WindowImageBackup is about the only safe thing you can do to keep multiple images. Renaming any of the sub-folders within WindowImageBackup is asking for trouble (in the form of making the backup unrestorable).

Macrium image are so much easier, you can give them meaningful names when you make them, plus they are a single file that you can move to (and restore from) anywhere you like, plus they are smaller than an MS image of the same system. MS does have compression, but it is not user-configurable, it's only use when backing up to DVD.

Also, have you noticed that on restoring an MS image the Update History for a Windows 10 system is empty? Not so with a Macrium image.

Yes to the nuking update history. That's always annoyed me. So I guess MS doesn't backup wherever that list is but Macrium does

spokey said:

Yes to the nuking update history. That's always annoyed me. So I guess MS doesn't backup wherever that list is but Macrium does

The MS backup and the Macrium backup seem to work on quite different principles.

MS back up all the necessary files on a partition to a vhdx, and on restore will copy them back. The file history seems to be regarded as unnecessary. It does mean that on restore there is no fragmentation though. It's not so much a system image as a system copy.

Macrium back up all the used sectors and restore them to the same position in the partition, with 'inteligent sector copy' (the default) all sectors marked as unused will be skipped. This will preserve all fragmentation, but does mean that you can't recover deleted files (for that you'd need to use their forensic image). Macrium do make one change to the restored disk, it adds a log file to record the restore.