Should I Be Concerned and Extra Cautious

I just completed a verified Reflect backup of my Win7/Pro x64 system disk (OS & Program files.) It worked fine. The Toshiba 2TB drive that Fry's sold me last month started making noises like a car alarm (horn beeping) about a block away. Loud enough to hear and get my attention. That was the disk on which I could not run chkdsk at an advanced prompt with the /r flag set.

I would have loved to wipe the old disk clean, but I gave up and 'simply deleted' the one Belarc profile I'd saved there and took at back. I let Fry's know that it was 'honking' and should not be put back on the shelf... I came home with a new 2TB Seagate (PN/ 9JB1N3-576 - ST2000DM001-1ER164ATA) and, with some encouragement from ignatzatsonic on sevenforums I initialized it as another MBR disk and ran a backup which verified.

There are complaints in Amazon 'reviews' about internal drives overheating in this eSATA drive bay. A month ago I had some concerns about heat dissipation in the BlackX Duet and made a 'fan-stand' out of bits-and-pieces in the garage to blow some air on it. The fan is a spare 80 mm 26 cfm Mechatronics (F8025S12bfs) with a switch that allows me to control external access to 12V DC from my power supply when I want it. I was pleased to see that the temperature only rose from 30°C to 32°C over the 30 minutes the backup and verification took. Data courtesy of Crystaldiskinfo. There is about 1.5" space between the fan and the top of the drive. Here's a photo:




Now I need to start thinking about a similar backup for the Windows 10 installation so that I can begin installing software and seeing how the new OS works for me. I have a busy 2 weeks ahead of me, but I'll see what I can do.

I thought I should document the apparent reason why my original attempts to use Macrium Reflect backup during the marathon upgrade process failed.

So sorry about the problems with the Toshiba drive. Glad you got that sorted! I like your setup with the fan. :)
No rush - take your time.

After I posted the above, as I was shutting down, I discovered this message:



I do have a A030DFBBE68BA17E-00-00.mring file in the folder I specified and the program said it was verified. I believe that the drive does have a backup file.

I gather that I must have set up the backup so that Reflect thought I wanted a Profile but I then failed to set something correctly. So much more to read about and try to remember. I can see where it would be useful to be able to launch a backup without having to open Advanced Settings and navigate to Auto Verify Image each time an image is created.

Clearly there is more to learn about Macrium Reflect before I can confidently say I have my system backed up.

That looks like a problem with the instruction set.
If you open Macrium, go to the Restore tab, select the image and click on Verify Image, you can check that the image is good. If you click on Browse Image, a box will pop up with all the partition in the image. If you have 4 partitions on the drive you imaged, there should be 4 checkboxes for the partitions backed up. If you only backed up the C partition, then only that one will show in the popup box.

Thank you, simrick,

I am pleased to report that the image was verified in slightly over 19 minutes.

I'm trying to sort out how to 'shrink' my C: drive. The SSD is 128 GB. My original 10,000 RPM WD Raptors (old system disks from 2008 build) are 74 GB and TreeSizeFree shows C: is now 92 GB. I'd like to use one to learn about restoring an image, but clearly I need to remove some bloat. I've already spotted 8 GB as pagefile.sys, 8 GB as $Recycle.Bin, and 15 GB dedicated to Mozilla (I am a mail hoarder.) We shall see. It is time to stop for the day.

baumgrenze said:

Thank you, simrick,

I am pleased to report that the image was verified in slightly over 19 minutes.

Great!

baumgrenze said:

I'm trying to sort out how to 'shrink' my C: drive. The SSD is 128 GB. My original 10,000 RPM WD Raptors (old system disks from 2008 build) are 74 GB and TreeSizeFree shows C: is now 92 GB. I'd like to use one to learn about restoring an image, but clearly I need to remove some bloat. I've already spotted 8 GB as pagefile.sys, 8 GB as $Recycle.Bin, and 15 GB dedicated to Mozilla (I am a mail hoarder.) We shall see. It is time to stop for the day.

Do you have just a small data partition you could play around with restoring? Just a thought.