How to simulate a disaster in order to test a Macrium backup?

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Mooly said:

Fitting an SSD to the Dell could well be the biggest leap forward in speed you could imagine. I did that 12 months ago to my Dell Vostro and to give an example, Macrium images the C drive in around 4 minutes (that's with around 30Gb of the C drive in use) and restores are just as quick.

That sounds like excellent advice. But I'll need to wait till after Christmas

Mooly said:

Did you create the Windows PE restore environment using Macrium ?

Yes.

Mooly said:

That allows you to restore from within Windows and covers 99% of disaster recovery. Its only the rare occasions when you need the bootable media.

I think I remember reading that in the User Manual.

The problem is that most people of my age used Unix long before Bill was born. So, it's tough for me to do anything to a disk from within that same disk - it feels like dragging my fingernails down a brick

Before Macrium arrived, I used a bootable Linux partition on all my laptops for disk operations. (A "mounted" drive is effectively a different disk.) I'll get round to that eventually on this new laptop - after I reply to all the generous volunteers on this forum.
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Bree said:

What harness?

Ah, yes. Erm. Quite so.

Here are the original instructions: "recover the image you created to a spare disk, pull out the existing disk, replace it with the spare"

I always tried to follow written IT instructions exactly. That helped to prevent the RTFMS comment from appearing in my performance assessments.

So, here's how I interpreted the original instructions. The bits in parentheses are my mentally added bits:

Step 1: Recover the image you created to a spare disk (without saying where the spare disk is currently located).

Step 2: (Then) pull out the existing disk (from your new Dell Vostro)

Step 3: (Then) replace it with the spare (disk that you used in Step 1 to recover the image).

In fact, based on your own instructions, I now see that the original instructions were in the wrong sequence for a non-techie to follow. The techie wouldn't even notice that: people see "what they expect to see". You yourself had no problems understanding.

The original instructions should have been (keeping as close as possible to the original wording:

- pull out the existing disk, replace it with the spare, recover the image you created to a (that) spare disk

So, by moving the first instruction to the end, it's now obvious that the image is restored to the spare disk, which is now in the new Dell laptop. So, no harness is needed. All that would be obvious to the techie. (I'm using the generic word "harness" to identify whatever alternative hardware is used to hold the spare disk while it's receiving the restored image. It might have been another compatible Dell laptop, for example.)

Bree said:

I have spare disks for both my laptops.

Where I come from, anyone who mentioned that in the pub would be thrown out for disorderly behaviour and profligate spending :)

Bree said:

It's a couple of screws to undo, pull out the original disk and plug in the spare. If you're talking about the metal frame around the disk, you could swap that from the original drive to the spare one. I don't bother for a laptop, the disk is a snug enough fit without it. For a desktop (the Vestro brand name has both) you'd need to do the swap, that's about four more screws.

These are all excellent instructions. Thanks.
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OldGrantonian said:

These are all excellent instructions. Thanks.

You're welcome. I see from our respective flags that we speak nearly the same version of English. Probably why we understand each other better :)

Would I be let back in your pub if I confessed I get my laptops from Cash Converters?

My, did that stir things up! Ok, so OP your not a techie, that's fine, but your statements and your alias say that you have a good number of years under your belt which is great. You read between the lines very well indeed!

Some facts, I had no idea that you were talking about a Vostro laptop as you did not say that in your OP. Your question was not platform specific but more of a general in nature question so I provided an in general answer.

So for a laptop the basics stated in my general answer stand true. Reason, Windows will not boot from a restored image applied to a disk outside of or external to a computer. So if you were to attach the disk you desire to recover the image to externally, perform the recovery to it then, put the disk into the laptop you have a greater than 99% chance that it won't boot. Reason, when you attach a disk externally to a computer in most cases that disk will be recognized as a removable disk and a limitation of Windows is that you cannot boot Windows from an external disk.

So where would the spare disk be located? In place of the existing disk as you said.

Does everyone purchase spare disks when they purchase a new laptop? No they do not. In most cases these same folks do not bother to backup their laptop either. Those whom choose to be proactive bear additional requirements and costs as it were to do so. Such is the nature of protecting ones precious data.

Someone posted about a WinPE disk and then made a statement about using that so that recovery could be done from within Windows. That is not correct. WinPE acts only as an environment from which to run the Macrium application to perform a recovery or a backup as either can be done with your machine booted into the WinPE environment. The question is can you successfully boot your PC into the WinPE environment? Without knowing that you can when the time comes to do so and you cannot then the image created by Macrium is worthless. So obviously successfully creating the WinPE recovery media and booting your machine to that media successfully are of the first and utmost importance in this whole backup/restore conversation. Additionally, while booted into WinPE you can perform backup and recovery operations to your computers disk while that disk is offline and therefore less prone to corruption.

So the choice is yours how you go about testing. You can certainly do as you originally suggested and destroy a perfectly good install on your computer and then restore your image to that computer. Before you do that however I would suggest that you create the WinPE recovery media if you have not done so already and make sure that you can boot your computer to that media before doing anything else. Once you know you can do that than the rest is just at your own risk and that risk assessment is up to your best judgement.

If you are using an Enterprise edition yes you can. The problem is not so much Windows itself as it is the drive being seen as removable. I should have used the word removable rather than external, thanks for pointing that out. Most imaging solutions will cough up a warning to the user in such cases that the recovery can be completed but the device will not be bootable when the drive is seen as a removable type.

Just a couple more thoughts to all this......

1/ When I got my Dell it came loaded with lots of unwanted junk plus other stuff such as Microsoft 'click to run' Office. It also came with a Dell utility to make recovery disks to restore your PC to as new condition. There was another Dell utility included that allowed you to make disk images (like Macrium does).

Now I knew all along I would very quickly format and partition the drive just how I wanted and then clean install Windows thus getting rid of the masses of junk that slow everything down.

2/ Something to be aware of... I used Acronis imaging at the time while I was playing around and found that once you restored an image that it overwrites the MBR (master boot record) of the drive with proprietary code. That in itself is not an issue. What it does cause though is the loss of dedicated Dell functions. Although the image is restored OK, you lose the Dell backup and recovery and I think the 'click to run office' as these relied on the unique Dell MBR to enable them to be activated.

For me that was never a problem because I couldn't wait to ditch all the bloat anyway and rebuild it all to a super clean and speed Windows installation using things like LibreOffice to replace MS office and so on.

Something to be aware of though as I am not sure if Macrium rewrites the boot record in the same way Acronis did.

Maybe those with similar practical experience could comment.

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Bree said:

You're welcome. I see from our respective flags that we speak nearly the same version of English. Probably why we understand each other better :)

:)

BTW: Our spoken English is obfuscated and encrypted in order to fool any invaders.

Bree said:

Would I be let back in your pub if I confessed I get my laptops from Cash Converters?

We would greet you with open arms. That allows us to do a body search for knuckle dusters, flick-knives, suicide vests, wallets, and credit cards
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Mooly said:

When I got my Dell it came loaded with lots of unwanted junk

I would like to remove as much junk as possible before creating an image. But with my luck, I'm guaranteed to delete something important. Is there a list of the junk somewhere?

Mooly said:

It also came with a Dell utility to make recovery disks to restore your PC to as new condition.

Where is that?

Mooly said:

There was another Dell utility included that allowed you to make disk images (like Macrium does).

And that?

Thanks.
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