Macrium Reflect 8.1 - Guidance and Updates.

f14tomcat said:

Just a general comment. The "performance" tweaks and enhancements Macrium worked on for so long to boost the rev (8.1) may have inadvertently crippled or degraded other parts of the engine. Other than my own experience so far and what I'm reading leads me to say this.

From Macrium Forum:

We have made some significant improvements to backup creation speeds in Macrium Reflect 8.1 and this required a slight change to the way backup data is stored in image files. We were aware that this image file format change could result in slower restore times, but our testing did not indicate that the change in speed was significant. However, with the benefit of user feedback and further testing, we have found some scenarios where the slow down is noticeable.

Our engineers have worked on this and they have now improved the Macrium Reflect 8.1 restore process so that it is now at least as fast as Macrium Reflect 8.0. That improvement is about to undergo testing in our QA Department and we expect to have an update available shortly.

cereberus said:

From Macrium Forum:
We have made some significant improvements to backup creation speeds in Macrium Reflect 8.1 and this required a slight change to the way backup data is stored in image files. We were aware that this image file format change could result in slower restore times....

The Macrium Forum is open for anyone to read, you only have to register if you want to post. You need to have paid for Reflect to do that. The quote is from this thread:

Restores Taking Longer on V8.1

kado897 said:

Apparently that's deliberate to stop it locking up the system.

and it did, twice, before I set the default back one notch to ~75%. Not a BSOD, just black screen and hung tighter than, well.............

cereberus said:

From Macrium Forum:

We have made some significant improvements to backup creation speeds in Macrium Reflect 8.1 and this required a slight change to the way backup data is stored in image files. We were aware that this image file format change could result in slower restore times, but our testing did not indicate that the change in speed was significant. However, with the benefit of user feedback and further testing, we have found some scenarios where the slow down is noticeable.

Our engineers have worked on this and they have now improved the Macrium Reflect 8.1 restore process so that it is now at least as fast as Macrium Reflect 8.0. That improvement is about to undergo testing in our QA Department and we expect to have an update available shortly.

Ah ha! Thanks, Martin. Without them coming right out and saying so, that "minor" image file format change could well account for my slower Verify times. Could.............

So far, I'm pleased with 8.1...

Of course, there will be bumps in the road but the company appears to be promptly addressing them.

FWIW.

f14tomcat said:

and it did, twice, before I set the default back one notch to ~75%. Not a BSOD, just black screen and hung tighter than, well.............

Which computer was that happening ? You have a great desktop but multi boot and a ho-hum laptop which can make quite difference. Lowering priority as default might have been move for lesser PCs to lower the load and prevent overload that van slow down or block it.
I just manually run already set up (for auto backup) incremental which at high priority made 5.4GB file in under a minute. Forgot to check system load but there were some background apps working and nothing even slowed down. That's on my 8 core. 16 thread desktop. NVMe to NVMe drives. .

CountMike said:

Which computer was that happening ? You have a great desktop but multi boot and a ho-hum laptop which can make quite difference. Lowering priority as default might have been move for lesser PCs to lower the load and prevent overload that van slow down or block it.
I just manually run already set up (for auto backup) incremental which at high priority made 5.4GB file in under a minute. Forgot to check system load but there were some background apps working and nothing even slowed down. That's on my 8 core. 16 thread desktop. NVMe to NVMe drives. .

It was my desktop. I also have it OC'd to 4.9ghz and XMP2 memory setting. I've had other apps not happy with that, MBAM to be specific. It's caused locked object contention before and I've had to back it down.

f14tomcat said:

and it did, twice, before I set the default back one notch to ~75%. Not a BSOD, just black screen and hung tighter than, well.............

CountMike said:

....Lowering priority as default might have been move for lesser PCs to lower the load and prevent overload that can slow down or block it.
I just manually run already set up (for auto backup) incremental which at high priority made 5.4GB file in under a minute. Forgot to check system load but there were some background apps working and nothing even slowed down. That's on my 8 core. 16 thread desktop. NVMe to NVMe drives. .

My main machine is a supported device running Windows 11, a laptop with a modest AMD Athlon Silver 3050U with two cores. Reflect has CBT and MIG enabled. I've just turned the priority up to maximum then run an incremental backup. Nothing locked up and I could still open and use apps, such as File explorer or task manager.

FYI -

Macrium is significantly slower on one of my other systems Internal SSD to External HDD.

Big slowdown. Not much difference than 8.0.
I kind of expected this due to the USB 3.0 link.

I'm moving all of my HDD's to archival usage only.