A brief overview of Macrium Reflect Backup

Transcript

OK, a quick overview of Macrium – I hope I’m pronouncing that right – I really don’t know – Reflect – free version. Once again, backup tools typically do end up wanting administrative access to your machine so you will probably see a UAC prompt as you go ahead.

So Macrium basically lets you take a look at the various drives you have. As you can see, I have a C: drive that will have my data on it; it has no label and I have D: which I have labeled as a backup drive. D: will be my simulation of an external drive or the drive to which you want to do your backups. What we’re going to do is create a backup image of an entire disk or selected partitions. Macrium fires off a wizard. It allows me to select now which drives I want to backup. I’m going to backup the drive that contains C: and the system reserved area in front of it which is the system drive that I’m actually running Windows from.

I’m going to back that up to D:. Again, you have other alternatives here; you can back up to another location on your network if you have a local area network set up; you can back up to CD/DVD if you have a burner (as you can see, Macrium is smart enough to realize that I don’t and not even offer that as an option). You can set the name of your backup filename.

We have some Advanced options that I want to go through quickly. I typically prefer to have it go ahead and spend several extra seconds compressing my data. This is one of those things that depends a little bit upon the strength and the power of your machine. Compression is a CPU intensive operation. If you have a fast enough CPU, I recommend doing this; it just makes for smaller backups.

Intelligent sector copy basically says only copy those sectors that are in use. An exact copy is a clone where even the empty sectors, the parts of your  hard disk that don’t have data, are copied. Normally, you really only want an Intelligent sector copy, you really only care about the data that’s on your hard drive.

File size. Macrium will actually do the right thing automatically for the different types of media that you have. NTFS will let the files go as big as you like; FAT32 has a limit of 4 GB per file so if you are backing up more than 4 GB it will chop it up for you; and DVDs obviously only contain 4.7 or 8 point whatever it is GB; CDs 640 MB; it will automatically do the splitting for you or you can set it up yourself. And, of course, you can add a comment to the backup.

And we are done. In this particular case, Macrium is going to go ahead and start backing up immediately so I’m not going to hit Finish but normally you would.

Now, one of the options that was missing and is something that I’ve spoken about before is incremental backups. This is the free version of Macrium Reflect. As a result, it too only allows for full system image type backups. Now the good news is that even with that, we can, we’re going to take the restore path here and take a look at (these are the backups that I happen to have there). This is one I did previously and I can now restore it to that location or…which…again, this would probably fail at this point because I’m restoring it to my active C: drive and a full restore is going to take booting from restoration media which I’m going to talk about here in just a second.

The other approach, the thing that I actually like about Macrium in this particular case is that you can browse the contents of a backed up system using Windows Explorer. So what I’ve done here is I’ve clicked on browse an image and it’s popped up this dialog that’s allowing me to select which of the backups it knows of that I want to browse. Now, I want to browse the backed up copy of my C: drive. And what it does is it temporarily assigns you a new drive letter. In this particular case, it’s defaulting to E: which is fine. I also want to enable access to restricted folders so that I can see all of the files on that particular backup.

And now, this is Windows Explorer but what we’re actually exploring is the contents of the backup I took a few days ago. So I’ve got some files here; I can go in and restore the things that I might need to restore. I’m not restoring the entire system but I can go off and I can locate those files that I deleted by accident or the old version of a file that I somehow modified and lost my changes to. It’s a wonderful way to take a system backup, a full system backup, and make sure that you’ve backed up absolutely everything and then be able to come back to it later and know for sure you can go back and get that file that you deleted or whatever.

I like their use of Windows Explorer as the browsing mechanism that they use too…it’s obviously something that they hope you will already be very familiar with. When you finally find the file that you want to restore, it’s as simple as copying it or placing it back on your C: drive.

I mentioned earlier that one of the things that we can’t do right now is do a full restore to the C: drive because we’re running from the C: drive. You can’t change the drive that you’re actually running from. That’s when you need a system restored disk or as they call it, a bootable rescue disk.

They have two options. I strongly suggest that you use the Linux option. Their BartPE is really for advanced users. It creates a plugin that you can then put into a BartPE bootable disk that you are creating. Now, if you don’t know what a BartPE disk is or if that sounds very intimidating then it’s pretty clear that you don’t want to do that.

The Linux version is great; it’s fine; it will do what you need it to do. In this particular case, we are once again going to create an ISO image file the virtual machine here that I have here does not support writing to DVDs or CDs, so instead it creates an ISO file which you can then later take to another machine and burn to CD.

Once you have that CD in hand, then you are ready for what I’ve referred to as the true disaster scenario. You’ve backed up your machine to an external drive. Your primary hard disk dies somehow or you have a massive malware infection so that the only thing to do is to restore the entire hard drive from a backup. If you replace a hard drive; you replace your system drive, what you end up doing then is booting from this CD that we create here which will bring up a version of Macrium and allow you to then browse for the backup image that you want to restore and restore it to the replaced or damaged, software damaged hard drive in your machine. You finish that restoration using their rescue CD; you pop the CD out and you reboot from your networking system that’s back to where it was before.

This is one of those things that people tend to overlook. It’s an important step when setting up backups for the first time. You want to make sure that either you have this rescue CD burned and ready to go; you’ve got it squirreled away somewhere or you have another machine available that you can use to create this rescue CD.

In some cases, the manufacturers – in this particular case, Macrium may, I say, ‘may’ have an ISO image that you might be able to download. But it’s much safer and typically much faster to be prepared.

Let’s see, so I’ve talked about the fact that we cannot do an incremental backup with this; the full edition of Macrium Reflect will do that. In fact, you can see here in their product literature that they are showing you that you can do incremental and differential images and they have a support forum and so forth.

I will spill the beans right now that I have actually taken a look at Macrium Pro, the full version of Macrium Reflect and it is likely that this is the tool that I will be doing a series of videos on much like I did on Acronis 2009. I believe that this might be the tool that I end up recommending in general for people to do their backups and be able to recover from them reliably. I did go out to the Macrium form and take a look at some of the responses. This is a relatively new version. Some of the kinds of things that were going on out there and was actually what one might expect. People were having some problems; people were asking questions and they were getting answers and they were getting support.

So that all looks very promising. I’m not saying it’s a recommendation yet but this is probably the direction I’m heading.