Poll on Backup software

The free Macium Reflect did clone the Cdrive successfully, but after it prooved to work, I thought I would reduce the size of C to make a second partition D and unfortunately the free MR seems very limited, and won,t do it.

tinmar49 said:

The free Macium Reflect did clone the Cdrive successfully, but after it prooved to work, I thought I would reduce the size of C to make a second partition D and unfortunately the free MR seems very limited, and won,t do it.

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Macrium Reflect is an image tool, not a partition tool. You can just shrink c drive from windows disk management.

cereberus said:

Macrium Reflect is an image tool, not a partition tool. You can just shrink c drive from windows disk management.

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Macrium can restore to a smaller partition provided the data will fit but you can also use Minitool Partition Wizard if there is not enough free space at the end of C: and Windows Disk management gives up on you. I just used MTPW for that purpose myself. It works well, it will do the shrinking at boot time if needed..

Macrium for my W10
and with this w11, I use ease-Todo Pro Individuals

Macrium USED to be my standard response -- as the Free version did everything I needed to do on a routine basis.

But now, since they have effectively "retired" the Free version, and the paid version is way faster, I am thinking seriously about moving over to using Hasleo Backup for the systems currently using MR Free. I did a couple of tests with it, and it is every bit as fast and useful as MR Free.

Mark Phelps said:

Macrium USED to be my standard response -- as the Free version did everything I needed to do on a routine basis.

But now, since they have effectively "retired" the Free version, and the paid version is way faster, I am thinking seriously about moving over to using Hasleo Backup for the systems currently using MR Free. I did a couple of tests with it, and it is every bit as fast and useful as MR Free.

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I think MR will be losing a lot of potential customers by dropping the free version.

Mark Phelps said:

But now, since they have effectively "retired" the Free version, and the paid version is way faster, I am thinking seriously about moving over to using Hasleo Backup for the systems currently using MR Free.

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I'm going to continue using Free v8.0 on my systems that don't have a v8 Home licence. It will continue to work in perpetuity, or until MS make system changes that break it. And for new systems the Reflect Free installer can still be downloaded direct from Macrium with the Reflect Free Download Agent

Bree said:

I'm going to continue using Free v8.0 on my systems that don't have a v8 Home licence. It will continue to work in perpetuity, or until MS make system changes that break it. And for new systems the Reflect Free installer can still be downloaded direct from Macrium with the Reflect Free Download Agent

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I suspect even if V8.0 is no longer actively supported that if something breaks seriously the free version, Paramount will still issue a fix just to avoid reputation damage but any such fixes will be on an adhoc basis.

cereberus said:

I suspect even if V8.0 is no longer actively supported that if something breaks seriously the free version, Paramount will still issue a fix just to avoid reputation damage but any such fixes will be on an adhoc basis.

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Yes, they had a history of doing just that. They issued a patch for v6 over a year after its extended support had officially ended.

Product	Released	Extended Support Start Date	Extended Support End Date
Reflect 6	16 Feb 2015	26 Feb 2017	26 Feb 2018

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Bree said:

Yes, they had a history of doing just that. They issued a patch for v6 over a year after its extended support had officially ended.

View attachment 54525

Product Support Policy

Macrium Software - the creators of Macrium Reflect backup, imaging and cloning software.

www.macrium.com

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Didn't know that -- means I need to rethink continuing to rely on it, as it might not actually be "retired" after all, just not still in "active development".

Mark Phelps said:

Didn't know that -- means I need to rethink continuing to rely on it, as it might not actually be "retired" after all, just not still in "active development".

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It will be retired at the end of the year but you can continue to use it until Microsoft makes a change that breaks it.

Mark Phelps said:

Didn't know that -- means I need to rethink continuing to rely on it, as it might not actually be "retired" after all, just not still in "active development".

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Personally, I, have chosen not to rely on it, simply because it isn't reliable in any way. lol... The same can also be said about Acronis True Image (or Cyber Protect), though, at least if using it the same way as the vast majority of people who tried it, but that in fact is why I never use it the same way. For me, it doesn't matter if it's more reliable or less reliable. The only question that matters is whether it is the least unreliable while still being practical enough not to defeat the whole purpose of how a system image will be used as a last resort, to get the system up and running again, reliably, and within a reasonable timeframe. Polls on the internet are not useful when it comes to gathering real knowledge about the various types of risks that relate to data security. Without the proper knowledge, it just boils down to preferences and a false sense of security to also hide the fact that it's just preferences. The value is roughly the same as that of a poll about what color of jacket people prefer to wear, with 23 pages of discussion about why. I don't see myself as an expert. But a trained software developer I am, I work for very large corporations none of which trust on Microsoft Azure for critical core business applications so, when talking about reliability, I think it will be reliable to assume that I know a few things about that subject.

MR is very reliable. If it fails that is due to a disk error! MR worked for me when EaseUs failed on a restore

kelper said:

MR is very reliable. If it fails that is due to a disk error! MR worked for me when EaseUs failed on a restore

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That was exactly my point. It works for you. That is, it works for you until after that awkward moment when Murphy's law has caused it to stop working for you.

hdmi said:

That was exactly my point. It works for you. That is, it works for you until after that awkward moment when Murphy's law has caused it to stop working for you.

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But surely that is the case with any software. There are degrees of reliability but nothing is 100% reliable.

The irony is, to test your backups, you need to do a restore; if it fails you may have to reinstall windows and your apps. EaseUS failed me due to a sector-copy write error but MR didn't. I never did find out why but EaseUs support was not helpful.

kelper said:

The irony is, to test your backups, you need to do a restore; if it fails you may have to reinstall windows and your apps.

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There are safer ways to test a full restore.....

But that is not as good a test. My EaseUs backup failed due to a sector write error. Restoring to a virtual machine might not have encountered this sector. And my laptop does not have 8GB of RAM. I can run a VM but it is painfully slow.

kelper said:

But that is not as good a test. My EaseUs backup failed due to a sector write error. Restoring to a virtual machine might not have encountered this sector. And my laptop does not have 8GB of RAM. I can run a VM but it is painfully slow.

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I successfully run VirtualBox VMs on a laptop with only 8GB of memory. I have found what really speeds them up is running them off a USB3 attached SSD. They will never be gaming machines but they are useable for testing.

kelper said:

... my laptop does not have 8GB of RAM. I can run a VM but it is painfully slow.

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The screenshots for that tutorial were generated on a machine with just 4GB RAM (and only an HDD). Yes, painfully slow - but it did work. I've treated it to an upgrade to 8GB now, as a reward for services rendered