Macrium Reflect and 1803 update...

cereberus said:

As an aside, people often wonder if an image backup is ok but only real way to be 100% certain is to actually restore it.

However, if using PRO, a good way of testing if the image is ok is to open the image in Viboot. If it runs, backup is fine.

This presupposes the image is on a separate physical drive and there is enough spare space on second drive equivalent to the WHOLE drive capacity e.g. you have imaged a 250 GB drive and image is on a 1TB hdd with more than 250GB spare space.

If you only have Home, you will soon be able to do similar with virtualbox as a vb extension is soon to be released to run viboot on virtualbox.

Hi there

That's also a great way of checking if you don't have a spare machine available.

Many people think just because an image is taken with the job completing normally that the corresponding restore will work -- and then horror of horrors they find out too late that it fails.

You don't need to check that every backup works - but you definitely should test at least these :

1) Major Windows update e.g 1709 ->1803.

2)Macrium release update e.g 6-7

3) any major modification to your system.

4) if 1) to 3) not applicable over say 1 month then test at least 1X per month.

With fast systems imaging shouldn't take more than 15 mins - often with SSD's can be around 5 mins.
Time spent here is never wasted -- losing an entire system and having to install from scratch, plus programs, plus serial numbers, plus updates, plus drivers etc will take people a lot longer than 5 mins !!! that's 100% certain.

statistically if the backup restores OK then the 4 scenarios listed should be perfectly OK.

Cheers
jimbo

A few days ago I clean installed W10 out of boredom but got fed up at the amount of junk apps like F2P games being installed and the re-tweaking I'd need to do so just reverted back to a fresh Macrium backup image.

Initially the restored Windows would not boot and I cursed for messing with a reinstall, but thankfully it was just the bios boot order that needed adjusting - dont remember having that issue on a previous restore though.

Macrium Reflect is great, my OS is exactly as I had left it before formating. I only use the free version too and highly recommend it.