Macrium Reflect for Back-ups - Clone or Image

[windy10]

Which should I use for a weekly back-up, Clone or Image on a external drive for Recovery or HDD failure etc.

thanks

 

[davehc]

For Me. Image every time for backups.

 

[lonewolfmage]

Windy~

Much of it really does depend on what you want to do ..

Cloning is GENERALLY(not always ) used when you want to swap out hard drives and make the new one BOOTABLE ... for instance:

Changing from a smaller capacity HDD (mechanical) to a larger or equal capacity HDD.
Changing from a smaller capacity HDD to a Larger or equal capacity SSD (solid state).


Imaging of a disk is more for Achiveal (back up purposes) and NOT (generally) bootable.

Check out the following link >>> Cloning vs. Imaging it explains it better

Good Luck.
~LoneWolf

 

[Tim Locke]

I have Macrium make the bootable USB drive whenever it want to and keep that taped to the backup disk. Then should I have a problem I can boot from USB to see what backups are available and off we go.

 

[windy10]

Just to clarify using MR cloning.

If a clone is made of my hdd and that in the event of a system or hdd failure or cloning a larger hdd, the clone being on a usb external hdd will boot when recovered back to the same or new hdd. Mainly to use the clone rather than System Restore in the event of problems.

Read conflicting things of some say it will and others, it wont.

thanks

 

[lonewolfmage]

Windy~

Check this link out LINK

**EDIT.. yes it talks about Acronis but he same holds true(or should) for Macrium ***

He pretty much explains it in vid/voice better than i can in an textual aspect ..

**EDIT . this is NOT my video .. and all videos from this person are allowable and shareable ..**

 

[StevenG]

Which should I use for a weekly back-up, Clone or Image on a external drive for Recovery or HDD failure etc.

thanks

I always use the 'Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows' this is a bootable backup copy that can be restored from a BSOD crash through 'Win PE' of Macrium. Btw, I speak from experience as I've restored a copy of Windows 10 in this way and it works 100%, the only limitation is "that you have to backup your system either daily, weekly or whenever you back your system up or the paid version you can do a schedule backup.

 

[windy10]

OK,
PC is a Dell 15- 3552 lapto windows 10 v1903

The hdd has 5 partitions.
1) ESP. fat 32 (LBA). primary 26.6mb - 500mb
2) unformatted primary. 128mb - 128mb
3) OS (C). NTFS primary. 357gb - 463gb
4) NTFS primary. 444mb - 792mb
5)WINRETOOLS.NTFS primary. 359mb - 450mb

Should I image just 3) OS (C) and 5) WINRETOOLS or just 3) OS (C) ??

thanks

 

[StevenG]

OK,
PC is a Dell 15- 3552 lapto windows 10 v1903

The hdd has 5 partitions.o
1) ESP. fat 32 (LBA). primary 26.6mb - 500mb
2) unformatted primary. 128mb - 128mb
3) OS (C). NTFS primary. 357gb - 463gb
4) NTFS primary. 444mb - 792mb
5)WINRETOOLS.NTFS primary. 359mb - 450mb

Should I image just 3) OS (C) and 5) WINRETOOLS or just 3) OS (C) ??

thanks

The simplest way is, open Macrium and click the option (as I said above) "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" and leave the marked partitions that Macrium selects and click "next", that is all you have to do, dont change anything! Dont worry about your other partitions as they are not taking up space for this backup but are necessary for a bootable backup!

 

[WestFred]

I've used the builtin Win 10 backup and restore control panel menu. Backed up and Restored several times, every time. I am going to use it to replace my HDD with a SSD in a couple weeks. Cloning works OK, but I just want my basic OS on the SSD, not all my other partitions. I will keep my HDD as a backup copy until I'm sure all is good.

 

[StevenG]

If you want to do that then do a clean install of Win 10, thats the best, simplest and easiest way to achieve that.

 

[WestFred]

Thanks Steve, I've used cloning software to put a SSD into my laptop about 5 yrs ago, and again into an older Win 10 PC a couple weeks ago, worked great. I have since removed the SSD from the older PC and replaced it with a new WD Black HDD with larger cache and running 7200 rpm rather than the original 5400, runs "almost" as fast as the SSD. I'm going to put the 500Gig SSD into my main PC that is presently running a 1 TB HDD with a second 1TB HDD for data and image backups. After many upgrades from Win 8 to Win 10, my main PC HDD presently has 9 partitions , and I'm not completely sure if they all being used, I suspect not. Any idea which partitions a clean install of Win 10 includes ? I have quite a few programs on my PC, it runs almost error free, and I'd sure hate to lose any software or functionality. Thanks.

MY HDD layout :

 

[clifford_cooley]

MY HDD layout :

After a long period of having C on the first volume. I decided to move it to the second volume for a bit.

As you can see Windows will run with only one partition. But depending on the features used other partitions may be required, such as using Bitlocker to encrypt you drive.

 

[WestFred]

How about recovery ? Using command "reagentc /info" is it enabled with only one partition ?

 

[clifford_cooley]

At first I was going to say no, and then thought about trying the command. I didn't know until running.

 

[WestFred]

Thanks, that's interesting since my PCs point to WinRE on a separate 500MB partition on the HD. If I take an image via Win 10 control panel, it will backup everything needed for my PC to run , and includes 3 partitions as per pic. I suspect the difference is in the type of basic interface, my main PC is UEFI, whereas my older PC is basic BIOS. If I run an image on my old PC it only backs up the C drive. Thanks for you reply, always something to learn with this stuff.

 

[windy10]

OK,
Final question on this subject.

One of the main reasons for doing an image etc.

Since the Sept 2018 Windows Update my Touch pad is not working as it had prior to the update. Despite trying uninstalling the drivers, updates and try Dell drivers etc. I cannot rectify the issue where the mouse on the touch pad is erratic and the left click with the touch pad mouse will not scroll pages yet it will highlight text etc.

So my question: if I do a clean reinstall with the Creation Tool keeping my data and files etc or using my Image. Will this install fresh clean drivers associated with the touch pad. Or should I do a complete clean install and reload all my programs/apps. Or even do a factory recovery.

Thanks