Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect  

cereberus said:

I will give it a go. It was a bit unclear on site about the download i.e. you could use it on an existing licence.

Download also gives five 30-day trial Macrium Agent licenses. A PC or VM managed with Site Manager needs a valid Home or Workstation license, or you can install Macrium Agent to it in which case no Reflect installation is not needed on that PC / VM.

FrankS said:

Here's the schedule page:

On the 25/05/18 it did a full at 5pm. On 28/05/18 at 00.00 it did a diff then at 02.36 another diff & at 23.00 a full. On 29.05.18 at 10.17 it did a diff. I'm slightly puzzled so this is why I'd like to start again.

So am I. That is very strange. It looks all set up correctly to me. The only time I've had a scheduled task run at the wrong time was when the PC was off. It runs when the PC is started up again. As I mentioned earlier you can get a new full image if you have made changes to the definition and also changes to the partitioning on the disk.

It may be worth starting over with a new definition into a different folder. Sorry I can't be of more help.

Dino Rider said:

One question I have not seen addressed is what effect defragmentation will have on the size of a Diff. Does Macrium look at the physical structure of the disk to determine changes or the logical structure? Also, if I schedule a Diff and then defrag the disk and need to restore the image, what impact will that have?

Thinking about it makes me think this is a dumb question but ignorance is fixable and I'm unsure enough to ask anyway.

Also, I'd appreciate some kind of response to my earlier question about scheduling.

Thanks

Probably same effect as with any other large file.


As you can see, Size and Size on disk are pretty close so .mrimg file is somewhat fragmented but not too much.

Dino Rider said:

One question I have not seen addressed is what effect defragmentation will have on the size of a Diff. Does Macrium look at the physical structure of the disk to determine changes or the logical structure? Also, if I schedule a Diff and then defrag the disk and need to restore the image, what impact will that have?

Thinking about it makes me think this is a dumb question but ignorance is fixable and I'm unsure enough to ask anyway.

Also, I'd appreciate some kind of response to my earlier question about scheduling.

Thanks

That's a good question. I noticed when I had the OS on a spinner that a defrag would increase the size of subsequent differentials quite considerably so I suspect it does look at the physical structure. I always used to schedule defrags to be just before a full image.

kado897 said:

That's a good question. I noticed when I had the OS on a spinner that a defrag would increase the size of subsequent differentials quite considerably so I suspect it does look at the physical structure. I always used to schedule defrags to be just before a full image.

Macrium Reflect Free uses smart sector copying by default - you can set it to do a full bit by bit copy but that is rare. File defragmention should make little difference. Indeed if partition was fragmented, and you backed it up and restored it, the partition should be much less fragmentes afterwards.

cereberus said:

Macrium Reflect Free uses smart sector copying by default - you can set it to do a full bit by bit copy but that is rare. File defragmention should make little difference. Indeed if partition was fragmented, and you backed it up and restored it, the partition should be much less fragmentes afterwards.

And yet I have seen it make a difference so the algorithm seems to be more complex. My understanding of Intelligent sector copying is that the filesystem (free space bitmap?) is used to determine if a sector has data in it and therefore should be copied.

kado897 said:

And yet I have seen it make a difference so the algorithm seems to be more complex. My understanding of Intelligent sector copying is that the filesystem (free space bitmap?) is used to determine if a sector has data in it and therefore should be copied.

Sure- possibly so, but the real point is how it restores things.

cereberus said:

Sure- possibly so, but the real point is how it restores things.

Agreed and that is likely to reflect the defagged image. No sure how Fast Delta Restore plays into all this. As Paramount have said the details of their methods are a commercial secret.