Acronis 2021. Ugh. It was the worst and last standalone version. I had 3 licensed copies of Acronis True Image 2021 and was so disgusted I downgraded them all to Acronis True Image 2018.
No, it isn't Acronis 2021. Rather, it is the Linux based bootable Rescue Media ISO file thereof. Booting straight into this ISO file with Ventoy before using it to create an image of an average size Windows partition takes only a few minutes on a fast NVMe SSD. In situations where this same Windows partition is the only partition with enough free space to create the image file on, this is what will save your day whereas Macrium will throw an error message basically telling you that you need to pick a destination folder that is not located on any of the partitions that you want to be included in the image. Another thing is that the menu structure you get when you boot into this bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis is very straightforward. For example, when you want to specify what files/folders you need to be excluded from the image, you can simply add/remove/edit entries on a list and use wildcards also if needed. Whereas Macrium forces you to edit the Windows registry to be able to achieve the same... it's nowhere near practical by any stretch.
With the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis the image verification step will be performed right after the image is created, if you check the Verify image checkbox that appears after you start the image creation task. Between creating the image and verifying it, no data will be written to the source. This and the fact that the verification is the same as doing a full restore except the data from the image will be compared to the source data (as opposed to will be written to disk) is what makes this verification robust and reliable. This is because the chance of a read error going twice undetected producing the same read result twice is a lot smaller than the chance of a snapshot capturing inconsistent data while Windows and various processes running are still actively writing data to disk during (and after) this capture. During this same capture the data will only be read once so cannot fully be verified after, as the source data will have already been modified before the verification can begin. With the above described image verification step, the images that the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis creates are pretty much as reliable as reliable can be. The difference between this verification and doing an actual restore are kept to an absolute minimum to help ensure that reliability will be robust in nature, and, due to the fact that this ISO file is based on Linux, personally, I, think it's safe for me to assume I won't be running into any unexpected bugs in it that might cause the data stored on my 2TB Samsung 980 Pro to be either damaged permanently or lost.
Image validation is not the same as image verification, BTW. If part of the data gets modified during and after the capture, then the verification will fail so there will be no point even trying, but the validation can still be successful nevertheless, as the latter only checks whether the data can be successfully restored, it doesn't compare the data from image to the actual source data. Those who claim that verification is unnecessary because they never ran into problems with mere validation essentially are saying that fire insurance is unnecessary because their house never caught on fire. Not pointing at you here, but this is what the vast majority of people on here have been calling a 'system backup'. The reality is that, on a normal PC with Windows running normally on it, a Windows system image does not qualify as a backup unless Windows had been taken offline before creating the image with proper verification. It simply does not meet the definition of a backup. The term 'partial backup' applies, but then, you probably already knew almost all of what I have explained so far, and I'm sure you also already know that my verified image that I was referring to still doesn't qualify as a backup until I've made multiple copies of it in such a way that it meets all of the other criteria that are necessary to be able to call it that.
My only point is, since the thread title is about making full disk image backups with software, either you need to write protect the disk or you need to boot into an environment that doesn't modify the data of interest. In both cases it means that Windows can't be running on the disk, and, in turn, this means that you can use neither the installed version of Macrium nor the installed version of Acronis nor any other program that requires to be installed on, and requires to be running on, your Windows installation if your goal is to make a full image backup that includes this same Windows installation. (There is a reason why the user guide of FTKImager mentions something about using a hardware write protection on your source disk before you start to create your image with it, but like I said I feel confident enough that the bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis won't corrupt my source data due to some unexpected bug in it.)
Finally, in the strict sense of the word 'full', a full disk image also means that the image can't be created on the source disk and no file/folder exclusions can be specified, and the type of image has to be sector-by-sector so unused sectors will also be included in the image. But it also is fairly common to use the description of 'full' more loosely, i.e. to refer to all the data
of interest (i.e. specifying to exclude e.g. the Windows swapfile, cache files, partitions' free available space and unallocated disk space, etc.). Either way, it still boils down to one thing only: no real verification, no real backup. There's imaging software and there's imag
ining software─where backups don't exist outside of people's imagination. lol
\
