Macrium: trial restore?

So far I've never had to restore an image and I'm not brave enough to wipe my OS as an experiment. But I have plenty of disk capacity, either on my internal 4 TB D or one of my external USB drives. So as a second-best is it possible to restore my OS disk C image (135 GB) to say D:\Macrium-Restored, on my internal 4 TB HD?

Obviously the all important boot test would be lost, but it would avoid my first restore experience occurring under stress conditions.

Terry
Version 1903 (OS Build 18362.476), Macrium Reflect 7.2

Yes, of course. It is the standard way to test any imaging program.

Depending on what your setup is, you could probably add a boot menu entry to your current bcd store after restoring and check it boots up ok.

Terrypin said:

...Obviously the all important boot test would be lost...

Do you have W10 Home or Pro?

If you have a machine with Pro (this one, or another) then you can use Macrium's viBoot to boot your Macrium image as a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Macrium viBoot - Create Virtual Machine using Macrium Image

RolandJS said:

That is a good test! Another safeguard: before the need for restore(s) arrive, do a verify on each image. If I somewhat understand MR Verify, it means the image was successfully read from beginning to end on that particular external media, it may not necessarily mean the backup image was perfectly made from the source media. Macrium reflect forum has a thread or two extensively explaining Macrium Reflect Verify, along with a little debate.
I've quoted myself in three other, different, places, to stir up interest and learning; if anyone is interested, can provide the links.

Thanks, I’ll try verifying. Do you set it to do so automatically, or just occasionally afterwards? If auto, what effect on the duration?

RolandJS said:

That is a good test! Another safeguard: before the need for restore(s) arrive, do a verify on each image. If I somewhat understand MR Verify, it means the image was successfully read from beginning to end on that particular external media, it may not necessarily mean the backup image was perfectly made from the source media. Macrium reflect forum has a thread or two extensively explaining Macrium Reflect Verify, along with a little debate.
I've quoted myself in three other, different, places, to stir up interest and learning; if anyone is interested, can provide the links.

Thanks, I’ll try verifying. Do you set it to do so automatically, or just occasionally afterwards? If auto, what effect on the duration?

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SIW2 said:

Yes, of course. It is the standard way to test any imaging program.

Depending on what your setup is, you could probably add a boot menu entry to your current bcd store after restoring and check it boots up ok.

Thanks. I’m technically way behind you here. ‘BCD’ was an unfamiliar term to me. (Although I do recall playing with boot.ini stuff a few decades ago, perhaps in Win 95?) Without a step-by-step guide I’d hesitate before trying to boot up from my D: drive!

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Bree said:

Do you have W10 Home or Pro?

If you have a machine with Pro (this one, or another) then you can use Macrium's viBoot to boot your Macrium image as a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Macrium viBoot - Create Virtual Machine using Macrium Image

Thanks, that look interesting. I have Pro, so I’ll explore that after some further reading.

Use viBoot if you have the Home version. You could also create a virtual disk drive, restore to that and boot to it.

Terrypin said:

Thanks, I’ll try verifying. Do you set it to do so automatically, or just occasionally afterwards? If auto, what effect on the duration?

I set mine to auto verify. It adds less than 10% to the total time required to make an image.

Going from memory, there is also a choice within the restoration process to verify at that time if you prefer, but I'd suppose that if it won't verify you'd rather know that now than later.

Re: overwriting. Pic below taken from Macrium tutorial from Macrium itself.

Note: "the E drive is not in the image and will not be changed by this restore".

Make of that what you will and assign whatever confidence you choose to it.

Fumbling around on Macrium site for a point blank yes or no answer to your question leads to confusion and use of "drive" and "partition" as if they were synonyms.

I'd like an outright yes or no confirmed answer to your question myself--from someone who has actually attempted a full image restore of all Windows partitions to a drive containing a data partition that the user does NOT want to touch AT ALL and that is NOT in the image to be restored.

I've looked at 40 minutes of Macrium Youtube tutorials produced in-house by Macrium and don't see clearcut info---not to mention fighting the brutal British accents and muttering that are at most one step easier to understand than Swahili or Hawaiian.

Additionally, I'm not sure if Macrium will restore to "unallocated space" or if you need to designate an empty partition as the destination. Maybe either is acceptable?