Macrium Reflect Set & Forget Question. How do I know it won't fail me?

lagunasrfr · 01 Dec 2017

RolandJS said:

I just now noticed something -- is your external hard-drive which receives your automatic backup always attached to your computer? If so, I hope your computer never gets ransomware, because ransomware ever hits, both the OS/Data hard-drive and the backup hard-drive will get hit.

Macrium has ransomware recognition and prevention on image creation now.

Steve C · 02 Dec 2017

lagunasrfr said:

Macrium has ransomware recognition and prevention on image creation now.

Does that apply to the free version too?

cereberus · 02 Dec 2017

Steve C said:

Does that apply to the free version too?

No - Macrium Image Guardian is only for paid versions.

The tool protects Macrium images but of course does not stop pc getting hijacked or ransomed, so offline storage is still a good plan. The feature just makes it harder for images to be tampered with or deleted but if a hacker took remote control of pc, nothing can stop images being deleted etc.

lagunasrfr · 23 Jan 2018

frankma said:

Hello all. Maybe someone can ease my paranoia. Some months ago I had to start from scratch and reinstall everything to my PC because I (very stupidly, I'll admit) didn't have a back up.

Since that time, on a daily basis at 5:00am, I have Macrium set to automatically back up my system and thus far have never had to attempt a restore. I also have it verify the integrity of the back up.

My biggest fear is actually needing the back up and there's a problem. Meaning in spite of actually doing "what I was supposed to do" so to speak, I'm still screwed.

Short of intentionally doing a restore (which I would hope anyone would be loathe to do for obvious reasons, myself included) how do I truly "know" the back up isn't going to fail me when I really need it?

Thank you to anyone with any insights on this.

Sincerely,

Frank

You can boot from your emergency macrium cd/dvd and restore a couple of files from your backup file. This should give you some comfort.

jimbo45 · 28 Jan 2018

Hi folks

The real answer to this question is that of course you can't know -- just like if you get into a plane will it have an accident. Statistically plane travel (sorry "Friends of the earth" people etc) is actually the safest form of transport on the planet --you are more likely to have an accident on the way to the airport than actually in the plane.

So realistically with Macrium the chances of backups failing are not very high so long as you have at least 2 copies on different HDD's etc.

I'd either try it out first on a spare machine or on a VM --if using a VM set the boot device as the stand alone bootable version of the iso. (the ISO downloaded from the macrium site). You of course need to test a restore to have any confidence in it --just because the backups work does not mean that the restores will automatically be OK so TEST first. A VM is a good idea.

If the initial (or first) test restore works I think you shouldn't have any further worries. If it fails then you need to find out what's wrong - so don't think just because a backup works the restore will automatically be good. It should of course --but lots of "Should things" on computers just don't work like that.

I really recommend testing first time on a VM -- you can create a VM -- don't worry about activating the Windows VM --all you want to do is test to see if the restore works so you can create a VM of your existing W10- system even if it's not activated. So long as the restore boots OK you are "in business".

Cheers

jimbo