Macrium Reflect Explanations

@barsim2

When you choose the option: "Create an image of the partitions required to backup and restore Windows", Macrium will checkmark all three partitions on Disk 1. This is normal.

The 100MB partition has the boot information (needed), the C: partition has Windows (needed), and the Recovery partition gets used in case of disaster, to recover Windows (not really needed, but good to have).

I don't have/use a Recovery partition, but other than that, here's a quickie guide...





Only the C:\ partition is on any respectable size... the other two don't even add up to 1GB.
At default settings, the backup will be about 1/2 the size of the amount of data on the C:\ drive.

Speed wise... a backup takes about 75 seconds for every 20GB on the C:\ drive, at default settings.

Don't forget to make the Macrium Bootable Rescue Media.
All the backups in the world won't help if you can't access them if/when Windows won't boot.





NOTE: When I say "default settings"... this is what I mean...

Farvatten said:

I don't think that's the case. All my differentials for recovery are blue where I know no changes have occurred.
.... I'm almost certain it's gray and for whatever reason wasn't selected at the time that full image was made.

You can be certain of that now.

My system has two Data partitions that I have deliberately excluded from my system image. The first is actually where the image is stored, and the second is just for temporary use by files I have no need to keep. The image includes the partition table records for those partitions (hence the are shown as existing in the image) but none of the partition formatting or data (hence they are grey). The image (Source) is the one at the top, and my actual drive (Local disk) is the one at at the bottom of this screenshot.

Bree said:

You can be certain of that now.

My system has two Data partitions that I have deliberately excluded from my system image. The first is actually where the image is stored, and the second is just for temporary use by files I have no need to keep. The image includes the partition table records for those partitions (hence the are shown as existing in the image) but none of the partition formatting or data (hence they are grey). The image (Source) is the one at the top, and my actual drive (Local disk) is the one at at the bottom of this screenshot.

I have a similar setup (only 1 data partition).

The grey area is untouchable unless you mess around deleting a partition in target.

As an aside, this setup exposes a weakness in both Aomei and Easeus i.e. they both save image as partition images.

So when you come to do a restore, you can only restore one partition at a time, so you need to do 4 separate partition restores.

Reflect does not differentiate between an image backup or a disk backup, when it comes to restoring, and you can just select however many partitions you need to restore.