Macrium Reflect vs Acronis

Superfly said:

OMG!
How can a modified anything be bit-wise or byte-wise accurate?

In-place modification can be exactly that, if the modification is done in such a particular way that the end result is verifiably identical to 1/ restoring the image to disk/partition(s) before 2/ modifying the data on the disk/partition(s), and then finally 3/ creating a new image while also deleting the original image for the fact that this original image never was part of the intended purpose or goal. On Unix, in-place modification was made possible by Ken Thompson in June 1974, which was when he released dd.

An image can either be sector-by-sector or be file based, but a sector-by-sector image can either be filesystem unaware or be filesystem aware. The latter type of sector-by-sector images can be used to exclude sectors that are unallocated by the filesystem, just like they can also be used to exclude temporary files and pagefiles, or basically any files/folders that are simply not needed so they would only end up wasting valuable storage space and slow down the process of image creation/restoration in such a way that could easily be avoided. Both Macrium and Acronis support both of these two different types of sector-by-sector images. Microsoft, Acronis and Macrium call them images because images is what they obviously are. But it's a free world so, you can choose to call them strawberries if that's what makes you a happier person.

Modifying images in the context of restoration is irrelevant - there is no reason for it.

It has been being relevant to a large part of the IT industry for half a century almost. Proven effectiveness very often tends to be a little hard to ignore so, that's why.

Via the link you posted clearly says "functionality isn't 100% reliable." - meaning it's crap or beta whatever - so? ... stay away.

Anyone who can be bothered to read the full context in the part of the article I linked can see the fact you just don't know when you've lost a debate. I already pointed out previously that one part of why I stay away from Macrium is that Acronis lets me avoid limitations inherent of the VSS and lets me avoid problems related to the VSS, as Macrium is the one that forces me to use the VSS, whereas Acronis is the one that does NOT force me to use the VSS in any way at all so, as a matter of true fact, what you just said is stay away from Macrium.

Creating an image on the same drive? Well I don't have enough knowledge to answer that with conviction, but common sense dictates that it's better to have an imaged drive's image on a separate drive may there be underlying/unknown hardware issues as eg.. on that drive.

It depends. If I have reason to assume that my system drive is starting to fail, then yes, I can always decide to get a replacement and then go back to an older image while also deciding to try and rescue any data from the failing drive that hasn't been backed up yet. By specifying to exclude those parts of the data that had already been backed up safely before the drive started to show the first signs of predicted failure like a S.M.A.R.T. warning or a read/write error, for example, I can create an image in such a particular way that 1/ read errors are ignored and 2/ the potential risk of inflicting further damage is reduced as a result from not accessing those specific regions that don't need to be accessed. After that, I can still decide on whether to proceed with trying to rescue certain files that had read errors in them, e.g., by using R-Studio or similar program specially designed for recovering important data from a failing disk or disk containing partially damaged data. But for creating an image the sole purpose of which is to avoid having to do a clean install of Windows, followed by reinstalling latest Windows updates, latest drivers, various software, and going through a hundred settings and two dozens of customizations, why would I want to assume that the hardware is going to fail on me during the process of image creation, when I already know that it's in tip top working condition? I mean, if you are worried about this risk, then you could always decide to set up a RAID type 1 configuration aka 'the Cadillac of RAID'.

Well i have used True Image for a good number of years now, at the moment i am using the 2020 version (or should i say i was)
For the last few months i have made a full backup using 2020 true image about every two to three weeks and they all valdated ok.
Then just a few days ago i had a problem with my laptop so i decided to do a full restore to my C: drive and ture image reported it was complete but with errors and on reboot the laptop said no operating system found so i made a clean install of windows and chose a different backup and the same again. Three time this happened but no more i am going to try Macrium.

As for acronis support all they say is my support has ended and i need to buy a new version if i need support (i don't think so)

I know for a fact that it's always possible to restore an image made with True Image in offline mode that validated OK. That's just because the validation process is the equivalent of doing a restore, the only difference being that the data is compared to the source disk/partition(s) instead of is written to it/them, and, if this hadn't been so, then nobody would use Acronis─the reality is that computer forensics specialists use this software. Macrium relies on the VSS entirely. Problems related to the VSS and the various limitations thereof have been proven to exist with reliable evidence. By contrast, permanent data loss resulting from permanent failure to restore an Acronis image in offline mode is still something that never happened aside from user error or hardware failure. Makes you wonder how much beer money a student gets paid to write up yet another horror story about Acronis and not provide any clues of any kind whatsoever that could help to reveal what exactly did go wrong. This is how reality looks like.