Image software

Can someone plz recommend a good imaging s/w which is easy to use? I have acronis but find it to be a little slow.

Thx

Welcome to the forum.
It depends if you want free or are prepared to pay an annual fee to use.

A free one not on this list is Hasleo

Bergy37 said:

Can someone plz recommend a good imaging s/w which is easy to use? I have acronis but find it to be a little slow.

Thx

Click to expand...

Have a look...

Hmm, whilst not a fan of Acronis, it should not be particularly slow. All the main packages are very similar in terms of speed really.

The fastest I have tested is Hasleo Backup but results can depend a lot on size, drives, file type etc.

Remember crucial point is reliability rather than speed. In this respect, if you have good experience with Acronis, think if changing is sensible.

As a minimum, I recommend you still use Acronis as a backup to any other package you select i.e. do not put all your eggs in one basket.

Note Aomei and Hasleo are Chinese and in the past I was unimpressed by the reliability and support for Acronis software.

Bergy37 said:

Can someone plz recommend a good imaging s/w which is easy to use? I have acronis but find it to be a little slow.

Thx

Click to expand...

Where are you backing up to? A new USB C SSD might speed things up.

Slow speed may indicate low disk health. Whatever you choose take a full backup soon as the disk may die at any moment. I was using Acronis Rescue to backup or clone disks. It is very reliable, however I didn't want to dedicate a USB flash drive just for Acronis, so I switched to boot with Strelec WinPE and run Acronis from there. But many times I see a warning that the disk could not be locked and I fear that the backup will fail or not be reliable. So I started using Macrium Reflect, also available in Strelec. I prefer Acronis, but Macrium is very good as well.

Strelec's WinPE is a live Windows 10/11 DVD or USB that boots into Windows 10/11 and contains many diagnostic and other tools. You can download the ISO here:

You can use Rufus or other utility to create a bootable USB flash drive from the ISO. After creating the USB you can add drivers and other utilities.

The WinRE/WinPE based bootable Rescue Media ISO of Acronis True Image 2021 is still the fastest, extremely reliable (more reliable than Macrium Reflect actually, as Macrium Reflect does not have a Verify option to, when a new image is created, check if the data written in the image 100% matches the data from the source), and it is among the absolute easiest to use, but it requires you to boot into the ISO file before you can use it. Booting into bootable ISO files from a USB flash drive is easy enough to achieve with Ventoy. (As an aside, several major brands like Western Digital, Sabrent, Crucial, and Kingston include a free downloadable version of the Acronis software with several of the storage products that they make, and they certainly wouldn't do that if they hadn't been perfectly aware of the fact, that this software is going to be reliable.)

When you install Ventoy on a USB flash drive it creates an EFI partition formatted as FAT32 on it to make it bootable. This partition is only 32 Megabytes in size. The remaining space on the USB flash drive gets formatted as exFAT by default, but you can choose NTFS during the install, and, you need to install it only one time. So, the USB flash drive never needs to be wiped again, which is a huge advantage because all your data stays on it after you've already spent hours copying lots of data to it. That's right, you can use it to store any kind of files you want, just like a normal USB flash drive. That plus the fact that you can put more than one bootable ISO on it. All it takes is to just copy the files to it. A part of Ventoy is based on Rufus, but Rufus compares to it like a car with no wheels.

When creating a new image, the bootable ISO of Acronis lets me choose a destination folder that is located on a partition that I have included in the source selection. Macrium Reflect does not let me. To save both storage space and time, the bootable ISO of Acronis lets me use its comprehensible GUI to easily conveniently specify exclusions with wildcards. Macrium Reflect does not let me. Some people don't like wheels on a car. But I like them.

Macrium Reflect does let you verify backups. You can re-verify before a restore too. It also offers inclusion and exclusion wildcards in a file and folder backup.

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW80/Verifying+image+and+backup+files

https://updates.macrium.com/help/v5/how_to/backup/backup_up_files_and_folders.htm

Ventoy sounds very good. I will try it. Thanks for sharing.

kelper said:

Macrium Reflect does let you verify backups. You can re-verify before a restore too. It also offers inclusion and exclusion wildcards in a file and folder backup.

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW80/Verifying+image+and+backup+files

https://updates.macrium.com/help/v5/how_to/backup/backup_up_files_and_folders.htm

Click to expand...

From the first link on that page,
"When an image is created each block of data (generally 64K but may be larger depending on the partition size) has an MD5 hash digest created after it is read from the disk and before it is written to the image file."
So, because I was referring to Macrium Reflect and not the bootable ISO thereof, with Macrium Reflect there can be no guarantee that at the end of the backup process all the blocks of data written to the image will still 100% match the blocks of data from the source, at least not while Windows is still actively running on a partition that is included in the source. To avoid this, you'd have to use the bootable ISO of Macrium Reflect, not use Macrium Reflect. If I do that, then what I have got left is a car with no wheels.

hdmi said:

From the first link on that page,
"When an image is created each block of data (generally 64K but may be larger depending on the partition size) has an MD5 hash digest created after it is read from the disk and before it is written to the image file."
So, because I was referring to Macrium Reflect and not the bootable ISO thereof, with Macrium Reflect there can be no guarantee that at the end of the backup process all the blocks of data written to the image will still 100% match the blocks of data from the source, at least not while Windows is still actively running on a partition that is included in the source.

Click to expand...

That's not entirely true at all. The image is not meant to track a LIVE FileSystem while it is engaged (same at the end of the operation as it was at the beginning... nothing can do that), it's meant to track a frozen FileSystem while it is engaged. The HASH created for the imaged blocks does not refer to the LIVE System, it refers to the frozen System snapshot being managed by the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) requested by the imaging operation. That LIVE action on the FileSystem is going on in the background and not affecting the requested image or its FileSystem. At the end of the imaging operation, the FileSystem lock offered by VSS will be released and all changes to the LIVE disk during the locked operation will be integrated back into the full FileSystem. There is really no difference between this operation and a similar operation going on under the ISO operation... both FileSystems being imaged are frozen in time at this point, the ISO operation being frozen due to it imaging an unLocked (unused) FileSystem and the LIVE operation being frozen due to a VSS snapshot of the FileSystem and its referenced blocks.

In the old days before MicroSloth's VSS offering, your above statement is very true... but VSS has been available for an application's use since the end of XP. Almost all the early imaging apps tried to use their own version of a VSS-like FileSystem freezer (Macrium & TeraByte) but eventually went to the OS supported version of VSS (why reinvent the wheel).

As Froggie says, all backups are a snapshot in time and, yes, by the time the backup is finished the contents of the drive may have changed. But if you boot into the ISO or run from a USB external device you are still backing up a snapshot in time.

spapakons said:

Ventoy sounds very good. I will try it. Thanks for sharing.

Click to expand...

It is awesome.

The contents of the drive changing while the backup is in progress is a non-issue. That is the whole purpose of VSS. A snapshot is taken before the backup begins, as a result you have a consistent set of data that will not change during the backup. Any data altered during the backup exists OUTSIDE of the snapshot and as a result will not be a part of the backup, nor will it affect the backup.

In addition, because you have a set of data in the snapshot that will not change for the entire duration of the backup, you also have consistent, unchanging data that you can run a comparison against. That is exactly what Reflect does:

Take a snapshot
Perform the backup
Perform a verification (optional)
Tear down the snapshot

Froggie said:

That's not entirely true at all. The image is not meant to track a LIVE FileSystem while it is engaged (same at the end of the operation as it was at the beginning... nothing can do that), it's meant to track a frozen FileSystem while it is engaged. The HASH created for the imaged blocks does not refer to the LIVE System, it refers to the frozen System snapshot being managed by the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) requested by the imaging operation. That LIVE action on the FileSystem is going on in the background and not affecting the requested image or its FileSystem. At the end of the imaging operation, the FileSystem lock offered by VSS will be released and all changes to the LIVE disk during the locked operation will be integrated back into the full FileSystem. There is really no difference between this operation and a similar operation going on under the ISO operation... both FileSystems being imaged are frozen in time at this point, the ISO operation being frozen due to it imaging an unLocked (unused) FileSystem and the LIVE operation being frozen due to a VSS snapshot of the FileSystem and its referenced blocks.

In the old days before MicroSloth's VSS offering, your above statement is very true... but VSS has been available for an application's use since the end of XP. Almost all the early imaging apps tried to use their own version of a VSS-like FileSystem freezer (Macrium & TeraByte) but eventually went to the OS supported version of VSS (why reinvent the wheel).

Click to expand...

I don't doubt that it can verify that the data that was written to the image matches the data that was present in the original snapshot. But you are still missing my point entirely. Snapshots are not backups. Sure, a backup of a snapshot is still a backup. Only problem, a backup of the data that was sourced from a snapshot of a live Windows system partition should not be confounded with a backup of a Windows system partition 1/ the installation of Windows on which was shut down before the backup process was started and 2/ all of the data on which can be guaranteed to have remained unaltered as a result of that shutdown until after the verification finished OK.

To put this another way, Macrium Reflect offers no method to verify that the data that was present in the snapshot did not contain any problematic inconsistencies of any kind that could potentially stay under the proverbial radar for longer than you originally had envisioned. This isn't to say that snapshots and backups of snapshots are completely useless as a result. Much to the contrary, they can be very much useful. Even so, on Windows 11 you can't grab the data from a snapshot of a live Windows 11 system, then back up that data, and pretend that no problematic inconsistencies can exist within it. Or actually you can, but then, doing so would kind of defeat the purpose of verification, by pure definition alone. That was my point.

hdmi said:

I don't doubt that it can verify that the data that was written to the image matches the data that was present in the original snapshot. But you are still missing my point entirely. Snapshots are not backups. Sure, a backup of a snapshot is still a backup. Only problem, a backup of the data that was sourced from a snapshot of a live Windows system partition should not be confounded with a backup of a Windows system partition 1/ the installation of Windows on which was shut down before the backup process was started and 2/ all of the data on which can be guaranteed to have remained unaltered as a result of that shutdown until after the verification finished OK.

To put this another way, Macrium Reflect offers no method to verify that the data that was present in the snapshot did not contain any problematic inconsistencies of any kind that could potentially stay under the proverbial radar for longer than you originally had envisioned. This isn't to say that snapshots and backups of snapshots are completely useless as a result. Much to the contrary, they can be very much useful. Even so, on Windows 11 you can't grab the data from a snapshot of a live Windows 11 system, then back up that data, and pretend that no problematic inconsistencies can exist within it. Or actually you can, but then, doing so would kind of defeat the purpose of verification, by pure definition alone. That was my point.

Click to expand...

I disagree - to a point.

I agree that a snapshot is NOT a backup. However, a backup that is taken that is based upon a snapshot is perfectly reliable.

Before a snapshot is taken, Windows stops all data from being written to the ACTIVE filesystem and flushes any writes that are in flight to give you a consistent point in time. Only then is the snapshot taken and the backup is then in turn based upon the contents of the snapshot which remain consistent and do not change during the entire duration of the backup.

I'm giving the highly simplified version here, because there is actually a lot more involved. For databases, mail servers, etc., those types of programs are VSS aware and take special actions when VSS is preparing to take a snapshot so that those applications can guarantee consistency down to the individual transaction, but that's a complicated topic that we don't need to go into here.

So, while a snapshot is not a backup by itself, a snapshot can allow you to create a reliable, consistent snapshot.

Please be aware that I am making the assumption that everything is working properly. As with everything else, things can break. But then again, things can break even if you are doing a backup where the OS is not even running. Nothing is perfect

I’ve used Macrium for years. It just works.

Votes here for ...
Macrium Reflect (freeware still available from majorgeeks)
AOMEI BackUpper (also freeware)

hsehestedt said:

Any data altered during the backup exists OUTSIDE of the snapshot and as a result will not be a part of the backup, nor will it affect the backup.

Click to expand...

That's the whole problem. When the snapshot begins, there's the possibility that a task is still busy writing multiple chunks of data, sequentially one by one, in such a way that the inconsistency does not go away until after the task has finished writing the last chunk in the sequence. The VSS can message your tasks so they will be notified about the fact that a snapshot is about to begin, but not all tasks have the ability to receive this type of message. Tasks that do have this ability can be quiesced. Upon receiving the message, these can be expected to begin preparations to avoid causing inconsistencies. Tasks that lack this ability usually are tasks that can detect and identify inconsistencies in the data that they can still recognize and associate with what it was that they were still busy trying to achieve. If they can keep track of the incompleteness of the data somehow, it means that they can attempt to recover from that, also usually.

Even so, data can still be lost due to being incomplete in such a way that causes some unexpected problems. It won't affect the backup in the particular sense that the backup becomes impossible to be restored. My point is that you don't know if the part of the data that went missing is never going to be a problem that stays hidden under the proverbial radar until it will be already too late. Not until you have verified that this can never happen, you don't. You can continue to pretend that you do. But the reality is that this changes nothing of the fact that you are still confounding a backup of an image with what I like to call a backup of an imagination.