Macrium Reflect v10

kelper · Oct 19, 2024

I love this conceit that some backups are not "accurate"! This was queried in an earlier post. A copy of a file can and often is totally accurate down to a single digit out of billions. Too many people seem to understand so little about computers.

cereberus · Oct 19, 2024

pseymour said:
The only way to trust any backup software, or any single backup really, is to restore it and verify it.

True. A good way to test a restore is to restore image to a blank virtual hard disk (.vhdx) and create a native boot entry for it.

That way you can test it without risking the main OS, and easy to remove afterwards.

TraderGary · Oct 19, 2024

kelper said:
I love this conceit that some backups are not "accurate"! This was queried in an earlier post. A copy of a file can and often is totally accurate down to a single digit out of billions. Too many people seem to understand so little about computers.

And the reason file copies, downloads, etc. are always accurate is the principle of checksums. After every packet a returned checksum verifies the accuracy of the packet. An individual file activity can involve a huge number of small packet transfers and checksums. W11 produces a 64-bit checksum packet.

PerpetualCycle · Oct 19, 2024

Well the verify is used to see if there has been some corruption after the backup data has been written by using a checksum of the data in the file. It cannot verify if the data was written correctly in the first place by the software, and not necessarily if there is corruption occurring during the backup by hardware or whatever. But it can with certainty find corruption that has occurred to the image after the backup was completed.

The speed of backup is absolutely terrific now, including verification on capable hardware. Macrium has also sped up restores in recovery boot. In addition they are using processor encryption and compression instructions for processors that have those. In my case, I can do a 128 bit encrypted and medium compression backup in less than 25 seconds now (nvme to nvme). Of course this performance depends on the processor you have, the speed of the processor and your disk speeds, so everyone won't see the same performance increases.

Anyway as far as how long backups and restores go, I think Macrium X is probably the best you can do.

As far as reliability of the backups are concerned. I have performed hundreds of backups and restores without a single issue. I have never been able to achieve that with any other backup software I have used.

There are no down sides to this software as far as I am concerned unless you consider the subscription or cost. Well worth the cost IMO. Peace of Mind for me.

kelper · Oct 19, 2024

"Well the verify is used to see if there has been some corruption after the backup data has been written by using a checksum of the data in the file"

I doubt this. The verify operation checks that the backup is identical to the source.

TraderGary · Oct 19, 2024

And if an individual packet does not verify, it is resent until it does. Thus, file transfers that are always dependably accurate.

hsehestedt · Oct 19, 2024

TraderGary said:
And the reason file copies, downloads, etc. are always accurate is the principle of checksums.

That is what I thought - until a few months ago. In addition to my backups I use FreeFileSync to replicate important data over to shares on a couple of other systems. I tried to run an executable on one of those machines one day and got a message indicating that the file was corrupt. I went to the original source and the file was fine.

I'll save the long details but after running checksum comparisons on all 190GB of data, I found several bad files.

I corrected the bad files and a week later I had more bad files. Much testing revealed that I had a "flaky" network cable. Corruption would occur using FreeFileSync, File Explorer, and RoboCopy. During the transfer of data NONE of these methods ever threw an error.

So much for checksums.

After replacing the network I have run multiple TB of data over that connection and never had a single bad file again.

cereberus · Oct 19, 2024

kelper said:
I love this conceit that some backups are not "accurate"! This was queried in an earlier post. A copy of a file can and often is totally accurate down to a single digit out of billions. Too many people seem to understand so little about computers.

The verification step was really important when dvds were used as the primary backup media as dvd write errors, although not that common, they were common enough with factors such as quality of disk, clean cd writer laser heads etc. contributing to a backup failure.

DVDs in their heyday represented a cheap backup medium (£/GB) when hard drives were expensive.

However, time has moved on and cheap large scale usb drive storage has meant dvd drives are practically obsolete now.

Modern hard drives (and even those of a few years back) are far more reliable and I cannot remember the last time Reflect failed a verification step. I gave up using it years ago.

I asked about use of verifications a couple of years or so back, asking if anybody had ever experienced a verification failure, and if it was really needed.

The main responses were of the type "I do them just to make sure" but nobody ever actually answered my question.

As you say, people do really not understand enough about computers e.g. the handshaking that is used to ensure every byte is written to a drive accurately.

Nowadays, it is so reliable and fast, it is taken for granted and nobody even thinks about it any more.

hsehestedt · Oct 19, 2024

One more thing...

On my wish list for Reflect is more flexibility in doing verifications. As was mentioned, verifications take a long time, but they sure do provide a little more peace of mind to someone like me who is paranoid about potential data loss.

I have another imaging program that offers the ability to do a verification check on occasion - like just when full backups are made.

pietcorus2 · Oct 19, 2024

Still dont know WHY(?) my 8.1 backups have more bytes then the same backup made by Macrium 10 !
Backups made by 10 are smaller in bytes , is it the reason why the bacups are made faster...........

kelper · Oct 19, 2024

pietcorus2 said:
Still dont know WHY(?) my 8.1 backups have more bytes then the same backup made by Macrium 10 !
Backups made by 10 are smaller in bytes , is it the reason why the bacups are made faster...........

I wonder why you are surprised. The compression is better and that's why backups are faster and smaller

PerpetualCycle · Oct 19, 2024

kelper said:
"Well the verify is used to see if there has been some corruption after the backup data has been written by using a checksum of the data in the file"

I doubt this. The verify operation checks that the backup is identical to the source.

That doesn't make sense if you think about it. You can verify the file anytime after you have written it, but the source has actually changed in that time - you do not have the original source to compare it to.

Here is what Macrium says about Verification in their knowledge-base:

"Backup verification checks the entire contents of backup files against MD5 message digests (Hashes) created from the source data when the backup was created. For more information on the verification process see: Understanding Image Verification Failures"

PerpetualCycle · Oct 19, 2024

kelper said:
I wonder why you are surprised. The compression is better and that's why backups are faster and smaller

It could be that they did not actually improve the compression algorithms, but increased the level of compression because the backups are faster. In other words this might be the medium level compression in 8 is not the same as in X.

cereberus · Oct 19, 2024

pietcorus2 said:
Still dont know WHY(?) my 8.1 backups have more bytes then the same backup made by Macrium 10 !
Backups made by 10 are smaller in bytes , is it the reason why the bacups are made faster...........

One of its features is improved compression algorithms.

The change in speed is mainly due to more efficient multi-threading techniques (parallel processing).

There is always a balance between time to write to disk and time to process the backup.

My tests with V8.1 consistenly showed "no compression" would backup quicker than "medium compression" implying the compression was the bottleneck than my nvme drives. The tradeoff was much bigger backup files.

However with VX (admittely limited testing), the times seem to be very similar implying the compression algorithms are much more efficient now.

Of course, hardware is a big factor. You could get a completely different view if using slow HDDs.

Winuser · Oct 19, 2024

I only partially read this thread so my questions may have been answered but I'll ask it anyhow. On the Macrium site I see they say there is a one time purchase with minor updates. I would like to compare the prices of the two but when I click on Purchase it only shows the subscription option. Is there a link on their website to buy a lifetime license? My second question is, if one does buy the subscription version, is it automatically renewed or can one choose to be notified that the subscription is about to run out?

cereberus · Oct 19, 2024

Winuser said:
I only partially read this thread so my questions may have been answered but I'll ask it anyhow. On the Macrium site I see they say there is a one time purchase with minor updates. I would like to compare the prices of the two but when I click on Purchase it only shows the subscription option. Is there a link on their website to buy a lifetime license? My second question is, if one does buy the subscription version, is it automatically renewed or can one choose to be notified that the subscription is about to run out?

The website has not been incorrectly updated properly!

This has been reported.

There is no perpetual licence any more.

I think (but not certain) you can do either regarding extending lease (@Bree would probably know).

Bree · Oct 19, 2024

Winuser said:
if one does buy the subscription version, is it automatically renewed or can one choose to be notified that the subscription is about to run out?

cereberus said:
I think (but not certain) you can do either regarding extending lease (@Bree would probably know).

Yes, I have one Reflect X licence, a free trade in of a recently bought v8 perpetual licence for a Reflect X 3-year plan. On purchasing(?) the free trade-in I had to give my card details. The sales invoice email included a link to manage renewals, by default it is renewed automatically.

dabl · Oct 19, 2024

Bree said:
I have a Host machine for all my VMs with an imaging/verifying time of around an hour for a Full image. Speed is my number one feature. My backups are run manually so I can choose a convenient time. That one now has Reflect X.

The rest have v8, four on Home, the rest on Free. They can stay like that for as long as v8 keeps working

Could you please say a little about your backup procedure/steps on the host machine for all your VMs running Reflect X?

I figure you're not backing up the VMs themselves, at least not with Reflect X?

If you are backing up the VMs themselves some other way I'd be very interested to know how you're doing that.

Bree · Oct 19, 2024

dabl said:
Could you please say a little about your backup procedure/steps on the host machine for all your VMs running Reflect X?

I figure you're not backing up the VMs themselves, at least not with Reflect X?

If you are backing up the VMs themselves some other way I'd be very interested to know how you're doing that.

No, I just back up the Host machine itself, which naturally includes all the vhdx files for its Hyper-V VMs. That's some 400GB to image. You could of course 'back up' any VM by exporting it using Hyper-V Manager.

I did once need to extract a older version of single VM from an image file. About the only way I could find to do that was to use viBoot to run an image of the Host machine as a VM, with nested virtualisation enabled. Then I could export the VM from the virtual Host machine and import it to the real Host machine.

hsehestedt · Oct 19, 2024

PerpetualCycle said:
That doesn't make sense if you think about it. You can verify the file anytime after you have written it, but the source has actually changed in that time - you do not have the original source to compare it to.

This is incorrect - it does not change! This is due to the magic of VSS (the Volume Shadow Service).

Rather than me trying to explain it poorly, below is an article that will do a far better job.

But the gist is simply that the VSS (Volume Shadow Service) creates a snapshot before the backup begins which ensures that you have a consistent file system THAT WILL NOT CHANGE for the duration of the backup / verification.

Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)

Learn how to use Volume Shadow Copy Service to coordinate the actions that are required to create a consistent shadow copy for backup and restore operations.

learn.microsoft.com

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