Macrium Reflect 8 Update Discussion

Wisewiz said:

Well, since we're both older retirees, we've had the very great good fortune to see the air age emerge and flourish. I recall flying across the Atlantic in an old four-prop TWA Constellation, and climbing up, up, up through the tail into DC-3s in Africa. I regret never having had the chance to fly in one of those Chinese biplanes. From the age of airplanes to the days of drones.

I got my single engine wings in a WWII vintage German Stork plane. first 8 jumps from an biplane Antonov after soloing in a glider at 16. My license expired in 1996.

Wow! That's amazing!

OK, so I was concerned about the fact that this MR8 thread had wandered into being an HP printer thread, and now we've "taken off" in an entirely new off-topic direction. Maybe we old fellas should get back to MR8.

I wish we could figure out how to help the guy in Backup & Restore who can't find a way to see the progress-bar window when an automatic MR8 backup is running. Seems that if you run a backup from a script or a batch, there's no GUI, and even if you open the MR application, it "doesn't have any idea" (his words) that a backup is running.

Wisewiz said:

I have MR8 paid on my main PC, MR8 free (expired trial) on my secondary, and MR7 free on Miz Wiz's PC, and I'll put MR8 free on hers ASA it's available, uh, freely.

[snip]

I liked keeping track of the times required to complete my pre-sets, so I'd know whether anything was significantly larger or smaller than the last run backup.

In V8, after my pop-ups, I get banners (and notifications, but I've turned those off) that tell me the backup has started (I knew that) and that it has finished, but no times. Gone without a trace. Of course, I can open MR and view the log for the backup, and scroll down, and the bottom line will be the familiar "Image and Verification completed successfully in <hh:mm:ss>", but that's a lot of clicking and scrolling to find out what V7 told me instantly without any intervention.

Does anybody know whether there is a way to get V8's banners to give the same information V7's banners gave?

If it's only the last backup that you're checking, you can use the shortcut key Alt+Ctrl+M. (Funny though, I just tried it for my last backup this afternoon & it was blank...it's worked every other time.) You can check if you have the shortkey set by going to How to configure the ReflectMonitor hot key - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase.

It won’t show all 4. In the past, it’s always showed the last one. Mine was blank today an hour ago. I’ll check again tomorrow.

@phrab @Homer712

Mine comes up blank, too. The key combo works perfectly for me when a backup is actually running (in my case, from a shortcut to one of my .xml files, so there's no icon on the taskbar, but there's always the reliable one in the tray during the run, and that one's r/l-clickable), but produces only the blank after a run is complete.

All the other member here ( @perkinw ) wants is some sort of reliable indication that a backup is actually running -- he doesn't care whether it's taskbar or tray, or even just access to the progress-bar window through the program. He hasn't found any way to get it to talk to him when his backups are run automatically on a schedule. (See that thread if you think you have any ideas. I'm thinking he could get it to cooperate with him if he changed to running his backups from batch files with .xml's as targets, through the Task Scheduler. Does that sound possible to you?)

Wisewiz said:

@phrab @Homer712

Mine comes up blank, too. The key combo works perfectly for me when a backup is actually running (in my case, from a shortcut to one of my .xml files, so there's no icon on the taskbar, but there's always the reliable one in the tray during the run, and that one's r/l-clickable), but produces only the blank after a run is complete.

All the other member here ( @perkinw ) wants is some sort of reliable indication that a backup is actually running -- he doesn't care whether it's taskbar or tray, or even just access to the progress-bar window through the program. He hasn't found any way to get it to talk to him when his backups are run automatically on a schedule. (See that thread if you think you have any ideas. I'm thinking he could get it to cooperate with him if he changed to running his backups from batch files with .xml's as targets, through the Task Scheduler. Does that sound possible to you?)

If MR8 is started from a scheduled task then it minimises to the system tray or its up arrow box. You can right click the icon in the system tray and select "Show" to see the progress.

@kado897 @perkinw

Looks like we have a winner, then. Whatever method perkinw is using now, he could probably easily change to this method, and he'd get the visibility he needs during each individual, sequential run. Task Scheduler doesn't even have to be involved. MR8 can schedule and run backups with .xml files, and the visibility should be available.

What say you, perkinw?

Wisewiz said:

@kado897 @perkinw

Looks like we have a winner, then. Whatever method perkinw is using now, he could probably easily change to this method, and he'd get the visibility he needs during each individual, sequential run. Task Scheduler doesn't even have to be involved. MR8 can schedule and run backups with .xml files, and the visibility should be available.

What say you, perkinw?

WWhen I say Task Scheduler I mean the Macrium one these days. It's much the same using the Windows one.

But the MR8-internal scheduler is much, much simpler, and there's no need for any other script, batch, or other program. Now the question that occurs to me is whether member perkinw has been using the MR8 scheduler all along, and getting no visible evidence that his scheduled runs are actually running. I hope that's not the case.