Acronis vs. Macrium for HD backup?

Awesome, thanks for remembering. I’ve shoot them a tweet. Here’s hoping for a coupon code.

I saw the same email on an upgrade with 20% off. No codes though as I am using the free version. The email is about backing up to prepare for Windows 11 (also, Haloween sale, kind of). Here it is if anyone is interested:

It might be the start of the spooky season, but that doesn’t mean you have to be scared your backup plan isn’t up to the job. And if you’re considering upgrading your Windows OS to Windows 11, now is a perfect time to upgrade your version of Macrium Reflect!
For a limited time, we’re offering 20% off Reflect 8.
https://www.macrium.com/windows-11?x-campaignid=v8-005d&x-urc=99XB-M2VZ&recommendation=something&cbtcouponcode=WX2-FJG-DCE&x-cbtcouponcode=WX2-FJG-DCE

Used to be that there was a time in which we ran a 4-pack games group buy. I don’t know if this works here but the 4-pack cost US$112. Who’s up to a group buy at US$28 each?

Macrium Reflect licenses are perpetual: they do not have an expiry date or require an annual renewal.
Macrium Reflect v8 Home Edition, Workstation, Server, and Server Plus for Exchange and SQL are licensed per machine - each PC must have its own licensed copy of Macrium Reflect installed.
You may only transfer a Macrium license to another PC if it is a replacement for the original machine (due to hardware failure, for example).

Or, if you want to hold out another 1.5 months, Black Friday might have another different sale.

I had bought Reflect 8 Home recently and attempted my first backup yesterday. It failed.

Acronis never failed on me with the same drives, and this is a brand new build of a computer. In fact, I don’t recall any of my backups going back decades ever failing. I ran chkdsk anyway, and I’ll see if that cleans up whatever Reflect thinks was the problem. I like what I saw otherwise and the options for backups are pretty extensive.

Question: Do y’all tend to schedule your backups or run them manually? I’ve always run mine manually on a pretty random schedule that’s all in my head, mainly because there’s no specific time when my system is on but not being used for something else. Unless I can also schedule it to come on and go to sleep in the middle of the night.

If it misses a scheduled backup, it just executes on your next boot.

Precisely one of the reasons I don’t use schedules. Unless it runs such low priority it doesn’t interfere with anything else (unlikely), it should only run during idle and that idle needs to be long enough to complete. That might be fine for the small incremental/differential backups, but wouldn’t work for a full image.

I asked about the schedules because I don’t see how others can use them unless their system is always on and idle regularly during specific periods.

[Edit] Took a deeper dive into the scheduling abilities and see that you can both wake the system and suspend after a backup. I’m going to give the middle-of-the-night backups a try to see how they go.

[Edit 2] Tried running the backup immediately and within a few seconds it said that the MFT was corrupt and to run chkdsk, and that was after running chkdsk last night. This computer is running perfectly fine since I built it earlier this year without issue, so I’m not sure what Reflect is detecting. The previous backup failed because of an ‘unable to read’ error that I ran chkdsk to fix. sigh

[Edit 3] Decided I’d run Acronis True Image to see if it’d go and it’s running the full backup fine. I wonder if having Acronis installed is somehow interfering with the running of Reflect. Does that make any sense?

I used to use the midnight backups and they worked OK, but I stopped because of two reasons:

  1. Windows can be shit about sleep. I got sick of the system not always going to sleep despite the explicit command to do so. Probably would work fine if I told it to shut down.
  2. The external drive I use for backups gets too damn hot. I’ve recently taken to plugging it in when I power the machine up, and then unplugging when the backups are complete. Longer term, I’m thinking about a DAS with a fan, or something like this: Wiretrustee SATA | Crowd Supply Or even a real Synology NAS, though those are a bit rich for my blood.

Logically speaking, no backup system can have zero system impact, but I run an incremental forever backup strategy, so it’s usually only about 15-20 minutes, and most of that is on the backup drive, consolidating the oldest incremental. Plus Reflect is the lightest, fastest, most efficient backup program I’ve seen. (moving from Acronis TIB to it 10 years ago was like night and day.) Probably don’t want to use it while playing games or rendering video, I guess, but that’s about it.

It also gives you the option to abort or delay the backup - here’s what I just saw 15 minutes ago when I booted up:
image

Even better, I have 3 backups running, one for each drive, because I have different retention periods for each - if I postpone one, it works for all, because they actually considered this use case correctly.

As to your issue, I’m afraid I don’t have any good suggestions other than checking their forums - I use Reflect both personally and professionally, and I’ve never had it misbehave in the way you describe. (I have had it throw a similar error, but a chkdsk did fix the issue in my case)

Backblaze at annual $70 is what I’ve been using for years. I’ve used various roll your own solutions, including the one where you could exploit an unlimited Google Drive (alumni academic account) for storage. Backblaze just chugs along, has low overhead, and honestly, all I need is a my data. A windows install is so painless I wouldn’t ever install the OS from a drive image.

What is the exact error?

Oh, that one was the usual CRC error. That didn’t come up the second time, replaced with the MFT corruption error. I hope the drive (a Samsung 980 Pro 2TB) isn’t failing already. Maybe it’s a controller problem; I did upgrade Magician recently.

However, I take back all of what I said about Reflect not working while Acronis did (both before Reflect, and the currently running full backup). Acronis has now failed with a ‘bad block’ error. So, it’s neither a Reflect issue nor Acronis; my drive has issues that need examining.

So, I’ll back out of this for troubleshooting as it’s a bit off-topic. Although, I can now say that Reflect detected the problem immediately while Acronis didn’t detect it until it had been running for over an hour. Plus for Reflect.

[Edit] And just to put a cap on this, after a little sfc /scannow fix of corrupted files, Reflect finished a full image in about half the time Acronis would take to do the same. Another plus for Reflect.

Macrium even released an update for v7.x to work with Win11 today not relegating support for that to v8.

Thought I’d add to this, since it’s relevant to the Macrium vs. Acronis discussion: I’ve been loving the scheduled updates in the middle of the night in Macrium. Smoothly starts up my system, completes the incremental, and sleeps it again. Been running that since I fixed my drive issue 12 days ago. Flawless and fast.

Happy I switched.

Excellent! I’m always chuffed when a recommendation works out.

I held out from the 20% discount and now, they have a once-a-year Black Friday sale at 50% off. I’ll bite at 50% https://www.macrium.com/black-friday?x-campaignid=v8-006k&x-urc=99XB-M2VZ&recommendation=something&cbtcouponcode=BLK-FRY-DAY&x-cbtcouponcode=BLK-FRY-DAY

$35 USD for those too lazy to click the link BTW.

The sale price is better than my upgrade price from v7:

image

The 4-pack is the best deal. US$35 for a single license and US$70 for 4-pack.

@rei have you had any success backing up iCloud drive (or, any internet cloud drive like Box, Dropbox, One Drive) using Macrium? I have iCloud Windows installed and tried to add it into my backup but failed with an error message “Access to the cloud file is denied” - even though the cloud file is actually in my local drive.

I don’t do the file based backup. I only image my entire C system/Windows drive. Need to figure out when the sale is good until to plan my pay check around.

I know this - it should be until 1 Dec 2021.