Macrium Reflect 8 Update Discussion

phrab said:

Since I backup to different locations, I am interested in the relative speeds of the backups. I could have sworn that I saw this listed somewhere in Macrium Reflect v8, but I'm not sure & now I can't find it.

Does anyone know if this is listed somewhere? [Not the amount of time for a backup, because that will change day to day.]

Thanks in advance.

Backup speeds depend only on hardware, just like with almost anything else.
Because of pretty high level of compacting, that's where CPU does most work and that can impact backup speed. A lot is done in RAM to, so amount of RAM and it's speed play a role.
Next is disk system, speed of reading and specially writing of destination disk and type of connection to it are most influential for backup speed. One example: I now have a fast NVMe SSD for Windows, backing up to another NVMe SSD and backup times are half of when I backup to a mechanical HDD and even longer when backing up to a USB2 connected HDD.

phrab said:

Since I backup to different locations, I am interested in the relative speeds of the backups. I could have sworn that I saw this listed somewhere in Macrium Reflect v8, but I'm not sure & now I can't find it....

I think you may mean this from the Troubleshooting section of the knowledgebase....

Macrium said:

Typical data rates for a correctly functioning system

During the imaging process, the data transfer rate is specified in Mbits/sec. The transfer rate will always be lower than the link speed, sometimes significantly. This is due to communication overhead, contention (i.e. shared use of the link) and CPU bottlenecks.

For backups to a USB 2 and firewire connected external hard disk, you can expect ~ 200Mbits/sec (1GB per minute).

For backups to a USB 3, you can expect somewhat more than 200Mbits/sec. It will typically be limited by the performance of the hard disk or firmware.

It is difficult to estimate the expected rate for backups over 100Mbit/1Gbit as it will depend on how saturated the network is and the performance of the network attached storage.Note that the data rate might vary considerably due to variable compression rates, link contention etc.

If you are getting very much less than these rates, then it is indicative of a issue.

Note that setting the 'intelligent sector copy' and differential and incremental imaging will greatly improve backup times.

Understanding and resolving backup and restore performance issues - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

BTW, my Google search found that section initially in the v6 knowledgebase, very little has been changed for the v8 edition.

phrab said:

Thanks for your reply, Dick. I’m not sure where I saw it, so it might’ve be in another app. I should have noted it when I saw it. I couldn’t find it yet in the knowledge base, but I’ll keep looking.

Phrab, I'm sorry , I misinterpreted your question. I thought you meant the relative differences in speed/time between V7 and V8, not between different hardware locations. My oops.

Yes, all those elapsed times, and Test Writing is available as others have listed.

On this option, you can test different external drives, or anything else for speed analysis.

Thanks to all that responded. I just checked to see how fast my Sandisk USB was on my Win10 computer's USB 3.0. It was a lot faster than I expected:

It did a full image backup of 171.92 GB in about 21 minutes. Although that image shows 3.2 GB/sec as speed, the log shows the write speed as 1.6 GB/sec.

By comparison, on my Windows XP machine (with a Seagate external drive), it took about 3 hrs & 15 minutes to back up 99 GB.

phrab said:

Thanks to all that responded. I just checked to see how fast my Sandisk USB was on my Win10 computer's USB 3.0. It was a lot faster than I expected:

It did a full image backup of 171.92 GB in about 21 minutes. Although that image shows 3.2 GB/sec as speed, the log shows the write speed as 1.6 GB/sec.

By comparison, on my Windows XP machine (with a Seagate external drive), it took about 3 hrs & 15 minutes to back up 99 GB.

That 1.6GB is the transfer rate, the composite "I/O" for reading input, CPU for compressing (and teeny other things), and writing to destination. It's not a pure write speed like the Test options. Test options are like taking a car on the track and running it full flat out around a race course. Transfer is like everyday car usage, stop start, speed up slow down, red lights, idling, etc.etc.

phrab said:

Thanks to all that responded. I just checked to see how fast my Sandisk USB was on my Win10 computer's USB 3.0. It was a lot faster than I expected:

It did a full image backup of 171.92 GB in about 21 minutes. Although that image shows 3.2 GB/sec as speed, the log shows the write speed as 1.6 GB/sec.

By comparison, on my Windows XP machine (with a Seagate external drive), it took about 3 hrs & 15 minutes to back up 99 GB.

So your overall rate is about 160 MB/s. So I guess that is attributable to your compression factor and processor performance. Do you encrypt too?

I guess those test numbers do not really reflect actual performance. My test yields about 730 MB/s but my overall rate is 210 MB/s with compression and encryption. nvme SSD _> RAID 0 (2 disk) SATA SSD. Mostly from fast processor I think.

Ah, my bad. You have macrium configured for Mb/s reporting and I have it for MB/s, so comparing apples to oranges on the test scores.

I haven't been paying attention to my rates, but 8 is slower than 7 for me. I was backing up 66 GB in 4.5 minutes in 7, now it takes 5 minutes.

Geneo said:

So your overall rate is about 160 MB/s. So I guess that is attributable to your compression factor and processor performance. Do you encrypt too?

I guess those test numbers do not really reflect actual performance. My test yields about 730 MB/s but my overall rate is 210 MB/s with compression and encryption. nvme SSD _> RAID 0 (2 disk) SATA SSD. Mostly from fast processor I think.

Ah, my bad. You have macrium configured for Mb/s reporting and I have it for MB/s, so comparing apples to oranges on the test scores.

Yes, I use encryption. I'm not sure whether that slows things down.

Thanks for pointing out the reporting difference. I wasn't aware that you could change the reporting from Mb to MB. But I found it in Defaults > Advanced Settings > Advanced Backup Settings.

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Has anyone noticed that if you
1. open Macrium Reflect,
2. choose Restored (the size of the Reflect screen...not the Restore tab) instead of maximized,
3. adjust the size
4. Close MR,

The next time you open it, it has a fixed restore size, no matter what size it was when closed?

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AMDMan2016 said:

Game SSD i don't bother backing up with Image software, or should i include that drive as well

For what it's worth, I back up everything on my C drive (which has all my files). If I also had anything on a different partition or drive, I'd include those also. If you ever have to restore, you don't have to go around hunting for anything.

Despite my posts about speed, I really did that for information. I have my backup set for the middle of the night, so speed of backup really isn't an issue. Also, I use a synthetic full + 7 incrementals & switch external drives each week. That way, I always have 2 weeks worth of backups readily available.