Solved Making a Macrium Image while actively using applications on the same drive.

I found it to be quite interesting that I can make a full disk Macrium Image at the same time that I'm actively using my C: drive for other work. At completion I get a message that making the image was made successfully.

I'm using the Dell laptop you see in "My Computers" below which has only a single 1TB SSD. My current Windows 11 Pro build is 22621.819. I don't do Insider beta's and I don't use any of the popular software to make Windows 11 work or act like Windows 10.

What is your experience doing this? Is there ever a problem?

TraderGary said:

I found it to be quite interesting that I can make a full disk Macrium Image at the same time that I'm actively using my C: drive for other work. At completion I get a message that making the image was made successfully.

I'm using the Dell laptop you see in "My Computers" below which has only a single 1TB SSD. My current Windows 11 Pro build is 22621.819. I don't do Insider beta's and I don't use any of the popular software to make Windows 11 work or act like Windows 10.

What is your experience doing this? Is there ever a problem?

Click to expand...

I'll do it all the time and never ended with problems.

I can second that.

TraderGary said:

I found it to be quite interesting that I can make a full disk Macrium Image at the same time that I'm actively using my C: drive for other work. At completion I get a message that making the image was made successfully.....

What is your experience doing this? Is there ever a problem?

Click to expand...

Macrium Reflect makes a VSS shadow copy of the drive before starting a backup. This allows Reflect to back up the snapshot of drive while allowing you to modify files.

Reflect can take an image of a live system. How does this work?
Internally Macrium Reflect relies on a Microsoft Windows component called VSS, which stands for Volume Shadow Storage. Microsoft’s VSS operates by taking what is called a copy on write snapshot of your system.

Click to expand...

About the only thing I notice is that the PC will be slower in use while the backup takes place. I've never had any issues with the backup that's made.

TraderGary said:

I found it to be quite interesting that I can make a full disk Macrium Image at the same time that I'm actively using my C: drive for other work. At completion I get a message that making the image was made successfully.

I'm using the Dell laptop you see in "My Computers" below which has only a single 1TB SSD. My current Windows 11 Pro build is 22621.819. I don't do Insider beta's and I don't use any of the popular software to make Windows 11 work or act like Windows 10.

What is your experience doing this? Is there ever a problem?

Click to expand...

If you think about it, it has to work reliably or else doing scheduled backups (only possible from Windows) would not work

Only time I have seen issues is when VSS itself is not working but that is rare and fairly easily fixed.

cereberus said:

If you think about it, it has to work reliably or else doing scheduled backups (only possible from Windows) would not work

Only time I have seen issues is when VSS itself is not working but that is rare and fairly easily fixed.

Click to expand...

I always made sure that I had nothing open and did nothing whenever I did Macrium Images. I tried doing something else while the image was being made just this weekend and I wasn't sure it would work reliably. I was surprised when it did. I had no clue what VSS was, so I learned something new today!

TraderGary said:

I always made sure that I had nothing open and did nothing whenever I did Macrium Images. I tried doing something else while the image was being made just this weekend and I wasn't sure it would work reliably. I was surprised when it did. I had no clue what VSS was, so I learned something new today!

Click to expand...

TG, now that you have discovered that you can use the machine while Macrium does its work, note it is likely that Macrium does not pick up the changes you are making until the next backup.

BobD said:

TG, now that you have discovered that you can use the machine while Macrium does its work, note it is likely that Macrium does not pick up the changes you are making until the next backup.

Click to expand...

That's why my primary backup is OneDrive as it works constantly in real-time, mirroring any work I do all day long. I started using OneDrive in 2007 and so far, it has never failed me. But nothing is guaranteed to be perfect and that's why I use additional backup methods.

Most imaging programs make a snapshot either using vss or their own drivers for a running os. It has been like that for as long as I can remember.

SIW2 said:

Most imaging programs make a snapshot either using vss or their own drivers for a running os. It has been like that for as long as I can remember.

Click to expand...

Macrium Reflect is the first imaging program I've ever used and I'm still fairly new to it. I had no idea they worked that way!

TraderGary said:

Macrium Reflect is the first imaging program I've ever used and I'm still fairly new to it. I had no idea they worked that way!

Click to expand...

Macrium Reflect was the second imaging program I've used. The first was Microsoft Backup & Restore's 'make a system image'.

That was a real pain to use, virtually no user options, and with a tendency to be unreliable when it came to looking for an image to restore. In the 3 years I used it I learned (the hard way) all the do's and don'ts to make it as reliable as possible, but it was an up-hill struggle. I switched to Macrium when Microsoft broke system imaging in 32-bit Windows 10 version 1803 and didn't bother to fix it until 1809 was released.










a

I came across it many years ago in the vista days. In Vista consumer editions, only Ultimate had system image included and there wasn't much in free versions, except maxblast which was a cut down acronis and only worked if you had a maxtor disk.

When I happened across macrium I gave an enthussiatic write up at VF which Shaun picked up on and lots of people over there started using it. Which then transposed as the VF people moved to SF. Very long time ago , might have been 2009 or even earlier.

It was very tiny program back then with a weeny little file for pe, which was only 32 bit if i remember correctly.

I have just found the little guy. I might have had a build before the one in the pic below, but can't find it.

I like the idea of the "copy windows installation" that JFX has just added to winntsetup. Using wimlib without the intermediate step of creating a wim. It is intended to be used from pe so he hasnt added the --snapshot switch as far as I can see. I might try the volume copy when I have a mo.

Extreme oversimplification, but let's say that you simply have some standard run of the mill data files. You are about to perform a full backup and that backup will take one hour. The backup program first initiates a VSS snapshot. The snapshot is basically, as the name implies, a snapshot of the system at that moment in time.

Effectively, any file operations (deletions of data, new files created, modification of existing files) while the backup is running are excluded from the snapshot.

Example: You start the backup and the VSS snapshot is created. Now, while the backup is running, 20 minutes into the backup, you delete a whole bunch of files and add a few others. As far as the backup is concerned, those file deletions and additions never took place. Remember, it backs up the file system as it was at the moment that the snapshot was created.

Now, take the example of a high-performance database, something like SQL or an Exchange Server. Those apps are "VSS Aware". When VSS is ready to take a snapshot, it talks to these VSS aware apps and basically says "I'm about to create a snapshot. You have x number of seconds to flush all data in-flight in buffers to disk." The app will then flush any data that is cached or in-flight and will defer all new incoming data. Note that such apps will continue to accept data and store it to disk, it just won't be included in the snapshoted data. Also, because buffers were flushed, the state of the data in the VSS is "consistent". In other words, there is no partial data because something was still in cache that had not yet been saved. Once the app flushes data, it communicates back to VSS and says "okay, I've flushed buffers and the state of the database is now consistent, ready to be backed up".

Again, this is an extreme oversimplification, but it gives a rough idea. If you really want to know more, there are a lot of papers on the topic.

Here is some documentation from Microsoft on this topic:


Here is information from Macrium on the topic:

That worked ok. Sort of a "clone" with exclusions. Might be handy. I have often made wim images or diskgenius images with exclusions. It is useful to be able to skip making the image and just do a copy with exclusions. There was masses of stuff on the source that I didn't want to copy across and it worked perfectly. Nice job wimlib and great idea from JFX.

BobD said:

TG, now that you have discovered that you can use the machine while Macrium does its work, note it is likely that Macrium does not pick up the changes you are making until the next backup.

Click to expand...

This is true but is only important if you make permanent changes to c drive. I always keep data on separate drive backed up separately.

cereberus said:

This is true but is only important if you make permanent changes to c drive. I always keep data on separate drive backed up separately.

Click to expand...

So do I but the newer UWP apps from Microsoft don't allow that luxury and many of them don't allow any independent means of saving their data.

BobD said:

So do I but the newer UWP apps from Microsoft don't allow that luxury and many of them don't allow any independent means of saving their data.

Click to expand...

It is all a bit of a moot point. What you say is true for data created during the time a backup is being made but once backup is complete, all new data is not backed up until next backup anyway.

However, you are right to point out that data changed on drives being backed during backup will not get backed up till next backup.

I use Aomei Pro rather than Reflect but the options are very similar, I still run my backups overnight as I've always done but occasionally I'll fail to setup the external drive correctly and the backup will fail and I run the backup on the live system without any issues, even when performing serious edits on large / Complex Images

SIW2 said:

It is useful to be able to skip making the image and just do a copy with exclusions.....

Click to expand...

When imaging a live system you can make exclusions using Reflect, it already excludes the volume shadow copy. You can add your own exclusions, but it's a bit fiddly and requires Regedit.

One of my machines dual boots with the 2nd OS as a native .vhdx. It only has a small 128GB ssd so I had to put the .vhdx in the C: partition. I exclude all *.vhdx files from the image on that machine. Separately I make a backup copy of the .vhdx as/when required.