Solved Latest Macrium Reflect X updates

Almighty1 said:

Since you are investing...

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I don't invest. I never risk holding a trade overnight.

TraderGary said:

What is the meaning of that sentence?

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Maybe like the old schoolboy logic

A dog is an animal, and an animal is a dog. Therefore all animals are dogs.

So maybe it means all bugs are features?

TraderGary said:

What is the meaning of that sentence?

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It means exactly as it says... Some people will say it's not a bug, it's a feature and some people consider the feature to be a bug. It's all in the perspective of the beholder as that bug could be intentional.

TraderGary said:

I don't invest. I never risk holding a trade overnight.

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There is always risk whether you hold it for 1 second or an infinite amount of time. I rarely trade as I usually buy and then hold on to it unless it's something that went up big, then I will look to sell and replace it with something else to add to my collection, that's why I still have over 100 holdings and a 24 year non-losing track record for things I invest in.

cereberus said:

Maybe like the old schoolboy logic

A dog is an animal, and an animal is a dog. Therefore all animals are dogs.

So maybe it means all bugs are features?

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Not quite, a dog is god spelled backwards so a dog can be a god.

Almighty1 said:

There is always risk whether you hold it for 1 second or an infinite amount of time. I rarely trade as I usually buy and then hold on to it unless it's something that went up big, then I will look to sell and replace it with something else to add to my collection, that's why I still have over 100 holdings and a 24 year non-losing track record for things I invest in.

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You're obviously much smarter than I am. Congratulations on your wealth.

Forgive me for posting something relevant, but look out for the upcoming Black Friday Sale for Reflect X deals. It'll probably suit new users rather than v8 users.

Here's something back on topic.
I just finished my nightly two Reflect X images.
I'm imaging a 1TB drive with 315 GB data.
I'm saving to two 4TB Samsung T9 Portable SSD drives.
Each T9 SSD rotates the last 7 days of images.
The two images took 5:11 and 5:03 to make.

Stigg said:

Holy thread derailment, Batman.


Forgive me for posting something relevant, but look out for the upcoming Black Friday Sale for Reflect X deals. It'll probably suit new users rather than v8 users.

Macrium Black Friday Sale

We only offer a discount this big once a year, so if you’ve been thinking about Reflect 8 Home, now is definitely the time.

www.macrium.com

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My guess is they will offer 50% of the lease licence for one year. Then you would revert to full price after one; year.

Last year they also offered (iirc) an additional 6 months free which at face value looked good until you realised the renewal date was no longer Black Friday so you could not take advantage of the following year's lease deal.

I have no idea if you were able to uninstall on next Black Friday and buy a new 50% off lease.


As you say, I doubt any deal could better any deals offered to existing V8.1 Home users.

TraderGary said:

Here's something back on topic.
I just finished my nightly two Reflect X images.
I'm imaging a 1TB drive with 315 GB data.
I'm saving to two 4TB Samsung T9 Portable SSD drives.
Each T9 SSD rotates the last 7 days of images.
The two images took 5:11 and 5:03 to make.

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I never usually bother with times, as I'm simply not interested in speed. I'm interested in reliability. But after reading about people on this forum who value speed so much, I decided to take notice next time.

I did a TeraByte Image For Windows restoration of all system partitions today, and it took a bit over 7 minutes. I couldn't care if it took 3 times longer.

Besides that, TeraByte Utilities are amazing and can do what most or all other applications can't do. TeraByte Utilities are very powerful and require some learning.


Edit: My images are stored on internal WD mechanical drives. My operating system is on an SSD.

Stigg said:

My images are stored on internal WD mechanical drives. My operating system is on an SSD.

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Your data would then be backed up separately? What is your data backup strategy?

TraderGary said:

Your data would then be backed up separately? What is your data backup strategy?

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My backups are entire system backups which includes all partitions.
I backup my system drives to other internal secondary drives. Bvckup 2 then backs up those system images to another tertiary drive.
The data on my data drives are also backed up using Bvckup 2.

How is Reflect X going for you?
There aren't too many issues being reported on the Macrium forum.

Stigg said:

My backups are entire system backups which includes all partitions.
I backup my system drives to other internal secondary drives. Bvckup 2 then backs up those system images to another tertiary drive.
The data on my data drives are also backed up using Bvckup 2.

How is Reflect X going for you?
There aren't too many issues being reported on the Macrium forum.

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In actual use, the UI is the same. Unless there is some kind of UI difference I haven't noticed. The biggest difference for me is the increase in the speed an image is created. This is quite evident for me as I make two local images on two portable SSD drives every evening while I work. They are only connected for the brief time it takes to make an image.

I use Macrium Reflect X for my local backups, and I use OneDrive to keep all my data and photos up to date offsite in real-time. I cannot risk losing any of my data and photos. I follow the 3-2-1 rule. 3 copies of my data, using 2 different technologies, and 1 copy must always be offsite.

Stigg said:

How is Reflect X going for you?
There aren't too many issues being reported on the Macrium forum.

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TraderGary said:

In actual use, the UI is the same. Unless there is some kind of UI difference I haven't noticed. The biggest difference for me is the increase in the speed an image is created.

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Agreed. The only UI differences I can see are the addition of a few new options, such as for excluding files and resumable imaging.

My one Reflect X licence is used on the machine that's always been the largest to image and the slowest. Not only are the images faster, but they are also smaller. My initial v8/vX comparison is in Post #59.

Thanks for your Reflect 𝕏 opinions, guys.

I'm probably in the minority, but I couldn't care less about backup and restore times. Within reason, of course. If a backup or restore was taking an unusually long time, then I'd be concerned.

Reliability is my number one priority.

Stigg said:

I never usually bother with times, as I'm simply not interested in speed. I'm interested in reliability. But after reading about people on this forum who value speed so much, I decided to take notice next time.

I did a TeraByte Image For Windows restoration of all system partitions today, and it took a bit over 7 minutes. I couldn't care if it took 3 times longer.

Besides that, TeraByte Utilities are amazing and can do what most or all other applications can't do. TeraByte Utilities are very powerful and require some learning.


Edit: My images are stored on internal WD mechanical drives. My operating system is on an SSD.

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You are right, reliability should be the #1 factor and then speed, as long as it's reasonable, it should be fine as long as it's within a few minutes of the other. Now if it takes 8 hours and the other one only takes 10 minutes and relaible, that's another issue altogether.

I think it's a better idea to use spinner HDD's than SSD's as the later might be fast but each backup means it will be doing frequent writes which increases the risks of the backups actually failing when you need them since you might not need them during the first 100 backups but you might need the 5,000th one and it fails.

Just curious, have you actually used Reflect 8 or X and compared it to TeraByte Utilities though?

Almighty1 said:

You are right, reliability should be the #1 factor and then speed, as long as it's reasonable, it should be fine as long as it's within a few minutes of the other. Now if it takes 8 hours and the other one only takes 10 minutes and relaible, that's another issue altogether.

I think it's a better idea to use spinner HDD's than SSD's as the later might be fast but each backup means it will be doing frequent writes which increases the risks of the backups actually failing when you need them since you might not need them during the first 100 backups but you might need the 5,000th one and it fails.

Just curious, have you actually used Reflect 8 or X and compared it to TeraByte Utilities though?

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I have compared both and these are my personal observations. I have tried to be even handed in my comments - no point in blindly saying A is crap, B is fine.

Overall, I felt that the Terabyte Gui is rather old fashioned and not that intuitive (although some could say that about Macrium Reflect to some degree). It is just a fact of life that the more flexibilty/features a tool has, the less intutive they are to use, and hence more effort is needed to learn them.

It seemed to be on a par with Macrium V8 in doing backups but not as fast as VX. However who can say this will always be the case - just depends on Terabyte's enthusiasm to get after this.

I am quite familiar with all the mainstream imaging tool GUIs as they all are fairly similar but Terabyte's GUI took me a little while to get used to.

My main issue is I could not see how to reorder partitions on a restore in one go (as you can with Reflect Drag and Drop).

Also, I could not tell if it had an important feature like Macrium Image Guardian and if it had the equivalent of Rapid Delta Restore (accepting it may have it but not obvious to me from the menus, noting again one could say the same about Macrium Reflect).

On another post there was talk about how to schedule fulls and differentials, and how to delete old backups which seemed to imply this was a unique feature of Terabyte - of course, Macrium Reflect does this very easily from its setup menus.

I could not ascertain if it had a feature like "Incrementals forever" where you create a full image and a number of defined incrementals (say 7, one done each day), and when an 8th is needed, the first incremental is merged into the full image creating a synthetic full, so you only ever have the least 7 incrementals.

In the end, personally, I see no real driver to switch from Macrium Reflect Home, particularly as Macrium Reflect Home has great support and reliability (plus I have great confidence in it which is a important fact to me).

I note cost may be a driver for others. I certainly see no point in paying for two tools - one paid and one free backup tool is enough for anybody. I do not want to get into lease versus purchase arguments - that is down to individual choice, so lets not go there.

I cannot say about Terabyte's support but have no reason to pre-suppose this is a negative issue. I take it on good faith of its supporters it is well supported and reliable.

Overall, my impression was it is a reasonable tool, and could be a good tool for somebody who wants more flexibility than most imaging tools, albeit (imo) perhaps not quite as much as Macrium Reflect V8/X. I also accept it may have features not in Macrium Reflect but I have not investigated that in detail.

Almighty1 said:

Just curious, have you actually used Reflect 8 or X and compared it to TeraByte Utilities though?

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I have and found IFW faster than macrium 8 but only one minute slower than X for my backups when selecting "Enhanced Speed" in IFW compression options. IFW has more compression options than Macrium does (pic attached).
I backup to two 2TB HDD as SSD are not good for long term storage.
Never liked Rapid Delta Restore in Macrium as I found some issues with files being corrupted after using it so I quit using it.
IFW has this too if select use metadata files.
IFW is by the same company that makes BootIt Bare Metal.
IFW first release was in 2002 and Macrium was 2006.
I extensively tested IFW by doing about 150 backups then see If I could restore after messing up Windows in all the ways I could think of.
Sometimes to the point even Windows own repair tools could not repair what I did.
All 150 IFW restored my system successfully.
After my testing I have now gone to IFW to replace Macrium.
I also tried and tested R-Drive Image which was good as well but slower than IFW when backing up and not as many "extras" for the price.

Almighty1 said:

Just curious, have you actually used Reflect 8 or X and compared it to TeraByte Utilities though?

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Yes, I'm a long time Reflect user. I haven't upgraded to 𝕏 though.

Here's a strange one.
I noticed today that my daily Macrium incremental didn't run
Opened up Macrium to be greeted by the Licence de-activated 'not linked to this computer' screen
Clicking on Move licence re-activated it.

The ONLY thing I did yesterday was the monthly Windows update (24H2)