Awesome updates coming in Macrium v7

[Chiefcrowe]

Is there a way to disable the system monitoring? I usually don't care if it takes longer to backup, i'd rather not have something that always runs in the background.

 

[readymix]

Is there a way to disable the system monitoring? I usually don't care if it takes longer to backup, i'd rather not have something that always runs in the background.

aye, edit defaults

 

[Elixer]

Wait, that doesn't make sense. The way their verification system works (using the auto-verify option during image creation) is by running an MD5 hash comparison of the backup file vs. a hash created from the source data when the backup was created:

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Understanding+Image+Verification+Failures

I don't think I've ever actually had a finished failed clone file...it always alerts me of copy errors (almost always hardware-related) while running. In your case, what happened exactly? Was this on v7? Did it make a full clone & then you tried to mount it and it wouldn't open? I've never had to clone a drive outside of Windows via a rescue disc...that's an odd response. The way their verification system is setup is that pretty much only a hardware error will make it trip up.

On the disk clone, verify only checks the filesystem before the clone started, nothing after.
On a partition image, it appears to do what that link suggests.
The logs clearly show verification is on...and here is what it shows for the failed partition clone

Clone Type: Intelligent sector copy
Verify: Y
Delta: N
SSD Trim: Y
...
...
Operation 12 of 16
Copy Partition: 12 - WD-F-2 (F:)
FAT32 11.45 GB / 16.69 GB
Destination:
Start Sector: 3,023,513,600
End Sector: 3,058,515,967
Partition Type: Logical
Checking file system
Processing: \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy10
Clone completed successfully

After the clone, it left 2 partitions in RAW format, and 1 partition (FAT32) was completely corrupted, no file or directory survived, heck, no timestamp was sane. I ran testdisk on those 3 partitions just to see if it could recover anything, and nope, it was hopeless. The other 10 partitions were fine though, did a checksum test on a few partitions, and they matched.
This was the latest in the V6 series, I didn't upgrade to 7 yet.
I didn't try to clone a disk again, since it takes a heck of a long time.

 

[Kaido]

On the disk clone, verify only checks the filesystem before the clone started, nothing after.
On a partition image, it appears to do what that link suggests.
The logs clearly show verification is on...and here is what it shows for the failed partition clone

Clone Type: Intelligent sector copy
Verify: Y
Delta: N
SSD Trim: Y
...
...
Operation 12 of 16
Copy Partition: 12 - WD-F-2 (F:)
FAT32 11.45 GB / 16.69 GB
Destination:
Start Sector: 3,023,513,600
End Sector: 3,058,515,967
Partition Type: Logical
Checking file system
Processing: \\?\GLOBALROOT\Device\HarddiskVolumeShadowCopy10
Clone completed successfully

After the clone, it left 2 partitions in RAW format, and 1 partition (FAT32) was completely corrupted, no file or directory survived, heck, no timestamp was sane. I ran testdisk on those 3 partitions just to see if it could recover anything, and nope, it was hopeless. The other 10 partitions were fine though, did a checksum test on a few partitions, and they matched.
This was the latest in the V6 series, I didn't upgrade to 7 yet.
I didn't try to clone a disk again, since it takes a heck of a long time.

Wow, that is messed up. The last line of "clone completed successfully" should have never occurred. Was there any corruption on the original disk, or was it only in the cloning process that things went south?

 

[Elixer]

Wow, that is messed up. The last line of "clone completed successfully" should have never occurred. Was there any corruption on the original disk, or was it only in the cloning process that things went south?

That is what I told their support people, and they responded with

Verification in cloning only verifies the file system on the disk and not the clone itself, verification is an imaging feature and not a cloning one.

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/TEST/Verifying+image+and+backup+files

Made no sense to label it "verify" if it don't actually verify, and it only checks the source file system for any issues (via chkdsk).
Original disk is fine, used clonezilla to make a clone, and that worked out, no issues at all.

 

[Kaido]

That is what I told their support people, and they responded with

Made no sense to label it "verify" if it don't actually verify, and it only checks the source file system for any issues (via chkdsk).
Original disk is fine, used clonezilla to make a clone, and that worked out, no issues at all.

Sounds like that needs to be a high-priority ticket in their queue imo. It should tell you if any part of your clone failed with a post-image verification check. Boo.

 

[Elixer]

Especially since it could be easily done in a variety of ways.
Read X sectors, compute a SHA1 (err SHA256), write it out, read it back, and verify, or just do complete clone first, then do a verify pass when done.
Sure, it takes twice as long, but, that is what the verify option should be!

 

[pcslookout]

Nevermind.

 

[pcslookout]

I am disappointed in Macrium Reflect v7.

 

[Chiefcrowe]

Just curious, why?

I am disappointed in Macrium Reflect v7.

 

[sm625]

I used macrium reflect and it actually cloned my drive without having to reboot into some castrated form of linux, like acronis does.

 

[Kaido]

I used macrium reflect and it actually cloned my drive without having to reboot into some castrated form of linux, like acronis does.

Yeah, and their recovery tools are pretty nice. They use WindowsPE for the USB recovery stick. Alternatively, you can just create a small recovery partition, which is really handy:

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/Adding+a+boot+menu+option+for+Reflect+recovery

Or PXE boot, if you want to get fancy with it:

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/PXE+Deployment

 

[Kaido]

Also for those wondering, it is possible to clone a larger drive to a smaller drive (ex. big Win10 HDD to smaller SSD) with Macrium. Video tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlZm5w99pGM

In a nutshell, you basically manually drag & drop each partition onto the new drive (jump to 2:40 in the video), and then resize the primary Windows partition, then drag the rest of the partitions after that on. Just do a little math to see how much space you'll need to trim off.

 

[Kaido]

They have an overview of the new central console here:

The console itself is free, then they have 4 packages available with various pricing structures for physical servers, virtual servers, and workstations:

Backup Starter Pack:
1 server & 5 workstations @ $489

Physical server:
5 servers @ $925 ($185/ea)
10 servers @ $1750 ($175/ea)

Virtual server:
5 servers @ $580 ($116/ea)
10 servers @ $950 ($95/ea)

Workstation:
10 @ $608 ($60.80/ea)
50 @ $2700 ($54/ea)
100 @ $5062 ($50.62/ea)
300 @ $11,137 (~$37.13/ea)
1,000 @ $33,750 ($33.75/ea)

I have one client who requested a full-site nightly backup for about 100 desktops, so I'll give the CMC a shot in the next month or so (that, plus the combination of the Macrium recovery boot option & vPro's AMT KVM tech on the newer systems makes remote management niiiiiiiiice). I am curious to test bulk-backup network speed to a NAS, especially given that they're advertising that the new backup engine in v7 can do incremental & differential images up to 60x faster. I am also interested to test the network backup speed with multiple machines because I have a lot of customers who want incrementals of their user workstations, not just CDP backups of the data, but doing that throughout the day is tough when people are working because it tends to slow the computer down, clog the network, hog the backup NAS, etc. But with the speed increase & stuff like Incrementals Forever (aka synthentic full backups, so you can "rewind" to your last backup, especially nice in the event of a virus or boot drive failure), I'm very interested to see if something like an incremental every 4 hours or even hourly could be done efficiently (and automatically). Macrium has a pretty good KB entry for retention & consolidation here:

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/Retention+and+consolidation

Protection is pretty easy on a NAS too, even against Crytpolocker...setup a backup admin account & spare backup admin account, delete the AD admin account (in case that gets hacked), and setup user folders with permissions only for read/write (no delete) so that every incremental gets "locked" into place. That way, even if you get something like Wannacry (user or network admin), your backup is safe & you can rewind. I've been installing a lot of HP Z2 Mini's, which let you basically setup VNC for BIOS-level access, so it's pretty easy to do a backup & then remote in to rewind to the last backup if their system gets royally screwed up. Plus if a user leaves the company for whatever reason, you can P2V their system in Macrium (straight into Hyper-V) & remote in to nuke their system back to your golden master for the next user...very very nice. It's still quite an investment (say $9k for a 100TB Synology & $5k for 100 Macrium licenses for user PC's, so ~$14k), but not nearly what it has been in the past...not to mention easier & faster now. I really like having really, really simple systems to manage, and Macrium has pretty much replaced all of my imaging solutions that I use on a daily basis.

This would be pretty cool for a home setup as well, especially if you run multiple Windows systems at home...Amazon has 10TB drives for under $400 these days, so a massive backup target is relatively affordable these days.

 

[Elixer]

I am curious to know how are you going to handle verification at the file level for those 100 desktops? Are you just relying on doing incremental (diffs) backups which should be doing some kind of comparison vs doing clone images that do no file comparisons at all?

 

[Kaido]

I am curious to know how are you going to handle verification at the file level for those 100 desktops? Are you just relying on doing incremental (diffs) backups which should be doing some kind of comparison vs doing clone images that do no file comparisons at all?

I'll leave that to the onsite tech, but most like daily spot checks on random files, perhaps an over-the-network restore to a spare machine on a weekly basis to verify that things are working properly. As you discovered with your false verification issue a couple months ago, this seems to still be an issue & requires babysitting to ensure that things are operating properly. Setup is one full master image per workstation & then daily (at minimum) incremental clones forever after that; they also have some incremental "join" technology for handling multiple copies over time, which is nice. Of course, regular backup verifications are just good practice anyway, but still. Also, if you haven't seen this, this is the hilariously awful story of how Toy Story 2 was almost lost forever:

Oh, and I did have my first clone failure ever (also in v6)...I made an image of a 32-bit Win10 machine with WIMBOOT (32g eMMC etc.) using the v10 PE (supports the compression-style installs). The clone was successful, but upon trying to restore, it said the image was corrupt. However, the image mounted properly for browsing, which is odd because if a imaging job fails, it typically does it during the process, such as if you're trying to copy off a corrupted or damaged hard drive, which causes errors to be thrown & the backup to be aborted. However, I don't know if that means the image itself was actually corrupted, or if Windows didn't like doing a restore with the compressed partition, or what. Maybe I need to change some BIOS settings, not sure of the root cause yet. All I know is that the image completed successfully & mounts properly, but upon trying to restore, it gives a clone failure message due to corruption, which I've never encountered before...but this is also a non-standard Windows machine, so there's that to consider...there may just be a separate procedure to follow instead. I'll have to poke around with the Secure Boot settings & all that in the BIOS later today. Although iirc, I also had issues doing a fresh install of standard Win10 on these types of machines in the past (they prefer doing a restore from the wimboot mumbo jumbo). Microsoft did have a guide on doing a wimboot-from-scratch install, although it apparently only lives in google cache now. So that's a little question mark project I need to figure out this week.

 

[Elixer]

Also, if you haven't seen this, this is the hilariously awful story of how Toy Story 2 was almost lost forever:

Nope, never seen that one.
So, they are lucky that one lady made copies for herself for viewing at home?
That seems far fetched, she would need to be lugging around multiple HDs to do that, and nobody else did, not to mention about 40 other questions on how a company like that could possibly let that happen.

But, in any case, it sure does show that people must be active to make sure that all backups actually work, and have been verified.

 

[Kaido]

Nope, never seen that one.
So, they are lucky that one lady made copies for herself for viewing at home?
That seems far fetched, she would need to be lugging around multiple HDs to do that, and nobody else did, not to mention about 40 other questions on how a company like that could possibly let that happen.

But, in any case, it sure does show that people must be active to make sure that all backups actually work, and have been verified.

You would be amazed at how many huge companies operate on a house of cards...

 

[Kaido]

Create a bootable system image restore USB stick:

This is handy if you need to zap a computer & don't have a NAS around to restore over the network from. I did this to a bunch of non-networked computers at a job this weekend, worked like a charm!


How to make a custom USB boot stick: (contains a bootable restore enviroment + system image)

1. Get a USB stick large enough to hold the data on your boot drive (128 gigs = $29 on Amazon these days)

2. Open Macrium: Other Tasks > Create Rescue Media.

3. Change the PE version to match your system, details here:

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Change+PE+Version

4. Click through the installer & tell it to download any necessary components you are prompted with

5. Select your USB stick & wait while it writes the data

6. After that is finished, clone your boot drive to the root of the bootable USB stick (note: if it's FAT32, it will break the image into 4-gig files, just select the first file when restoring)


How to restore an image from a USB boot stick:

1. Plug in the USB stick & boot to it from BIOS

2. Browse for an image file (top center under the Image Restore tab), select your USB stick & then double-click on your image file to load it

3. Select "Restore Image" on the center-right of the screen

4. Adjust the partitions as desired (or just leave default), click through the options, confirm overwrite, and wait for the restore to finish

5. Click the Close button when complete, then go to the power button in the left-bottom of the screen to reboot into the (restored) Windows OS

 

[Kaido]

Oh, and I did have my first clone failure ever (also in v6)...I made an image of a 32-bit Win10 machine with WIMBOOT (32g eMMC etc.) using the v10 PE (supports the compression-style installs). The clone was successful, but upon trying to restore, it said the image was corrupt. However, the image mounted properly for browsing, which is odd because if a imaging job fails, it typically does it during the process, such as if you're trying to copy off a corrupted or damaged hard drive, which causes errors to be thrown & the backup to be aborted. However, I don't know if that means the image itself was actually corrupted, or if Windows didn't like doing a restore with the compressed partition, or what. Maybe I need to change some BIOS settings, not sure of the root cause yet. All I know is that the image completed successfully & mounts properly, but upon trying to restore, it gives a clone failure message due to corruption, which I've never encountered before...but this is also a non-standard Windows machine, so there's that to consider...there may just be a separate procedure to follow instead. I'll have to poke around with the Secure Boot settings & all that in the BIOS later today. Although iirc, I also had issues doing a fresh install of standard Win10 on these types of machines in the past (they prefer doing a restore from the wimboot mumbo jumbo). Microsoft did have a guide on doing a wimboot-from-scratch install, although it apparently only lives in google cache now. So that's a little question mark project I need to figure out this week.

Update: this turned out to be a corruption issue on the customer NAS, not an issue with Macrium. It restored just fine from an image on a USB hard drive. Oddly, however, it let me mount the image & browse, but it would fail partway through restore. To Elixer's earlier point, this is an issue because it doesn't appear to be doing a 100% effective verification job. I typically just mount & browse an image after creation to verify that it was correctly created, but that does not apply to every circumstance. This is the first time it has ever happened to me (v6 FYI, not V7). Might have to update my procedure to doing a quick Hyper-V boot to ensure image validity in the future.

 

[Kaido]

Special note - a few updates on Macrium 7 had some data corruption issues, so you'll need to upgrade to fix it:

https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW7/Corrupt+Incremental+Image+Files

Macrium Reflect: (these builds were available for download from 17th April till 3rd of May when the issue was resolved with the release of v7.1.3196)

v7.1.3147
v7.1.3159
v7.1.3169

It is possible for Macrium Reflect to created corrupt Incremental, and to a lesser extent, Differential Images if they were created with the releases listed above. *These images should not be restored.*

If you haven't done so already, we strongly advise that you update to the latest release (v7.1.3196) by taking the 'Other Tasks' > 'Check for updates' menu option.

 

[Ankur Saxena]

Thanks for sharing the updates Kaido