Windows 10: Acronis True Image vs Macrium Reflect

I looked into automating the restore function of MR a while back and found that there is NO way to do this. Its never been implemented. If I remember correctly, years ago I asked about batch restores on their forum, and the answer was Not Supported.

The previous poster stated he seen a "/r" parameter, which there is, but its used to recurse thru folders if you specify a folder to perform verification.

 

Probably to coincide with the new windows upgrade releasing about that time. Seem like it was about this time last year when we all had issues after the creator update.

 

Yea great write up. I really couldn't explain any better. I will add my experience. Being a long time user of Acronis I was happy buying the new version every year and only experienced 1 failure to restore in all that time. However in 2012 I bought a Asus Gaming notebook G75VW man it was fancy had an SSD fast CPU GPU, well I created my first full SSD Image right off the bat, just incase I ran into any issues while configuring the notebook and my software. Well yep I did crash that OS, and popped in my restore media and restored, to my great disappointment the restore would not boot. I finaly was able to get in touch with Acronis tech support, worked with them for a day or so. The really had no Idea. I ran several Repair installs thinking the boot manger would repair and let the SSD Boot up. Never happen. As I clean install windows 7 SP 1, I learned about UEFI and GPT volumes finally got the notebook working again. So I check with the Acronis support forum yep Acronis reports the support UEFI and GPT disk. Created another Image and tried to restore it and again it won't boot. This time I went in to there support forum and asked for help, eventually one of the user there had some Idea what was going on we created the partition required for a UEFI system to boot and that did work. Still this is not the ideal situation that I have to set up a disk/ssd before restoring. I looked around and found just about all imaging programs were having the same issue of not being able to create a bootable image. Eventually I found out about Macrium Reflect from the ROG Forum tried it and the first try perfect restore booted right up. I still continued to use Acronis on my MBR machines for another year or so while I tested out MR for routine daily back ups etc. Then in 2015 with Acronis latest UEFI compliant version I still could not create a bootable restore. I just gave up and purchased a 4 pack of MR Pro and I haven't looked bac since. Acronis has no tech support at all unless you have an issue restoring then its very difficult to get in touch with them. Worst part is after you do get to one , there techs don't know as much as you do.

 

Actually, there was for a short time a CD that when booted in a computer would immediately begin a clone of the source hard-drive onto a target hard-drive and do it without any user input. The user had to be absolutely sure s/he put the source and the target on the right ends of the provided cloning cable. The name of that utility -- I cannot remember. I do remember "re-making" my copy of that CD so that I had control over the process.

 

version 7.1 is out, my 7.0 updated yesterday, and there is a patch update this morning (one 'english' screen apparently showed up in german on some PCs)

now on 7.1 build 2607 home vers. i also gather there is a new free version too.

having the ability to do incrementals (and consolidate them) and delta indexing and fast restore is well worth the cost of the paid home version. i can do a restore in 2.5 minutes. (if there have been only minor changes). having winpe and being able to run macrium from the bcd boot menu is also useful. i rarely need a boot cd or usb anymore.

p.s. - pro users, don't forget to recreate your rescue media.

 

100% agree. Rapid Delta Restore is (paraphrasing @Kari) like using System Restore on Steroids. You can roll back pc to earlier state in less than five minutes if only minorish changes. Great if you deleted some files accidentally, or installed a new prgram or driver giving issues. I never use System Restore any more.

 

Years ago I used a program from Seagate called Replica. It was very slow, but I have to give them credit. I used it to restore probably 10-12 times and it was perfect every time. But, it was very slow, probably at least an hour to hour and a half to do a restore, but heck. It worked and that was the important part. I heard about Macrium and tried that. I loved it. It was reliable, fast and easy to use. I've been with Reflect every since and never looked at anything else.

 

You can create a PowerShell script to do all of that over a pre-installation environment, but definitely not in a single executable line, though it would not take many if you were to use Macrium's image mounting command switches and then PowerShell's default .NET object cmdlets for the rest. Using Try/Catch/Finally blocks for stuff like this is highly recommended.

I use Macrium Reflect Server Plus 7.0 and Home. To automate everything like you want, you will have to set up both global variables and dynamic parameters in order for the script to initiate functions regardless if environmental variables change, unless you assign static variables to things and the environment does not change (i.e. disk change, formatting differences, etc.).

 

I am another longtime Acronis user since TI8. I own over 100 licenses. Acronis has literally been a royal PIA since B&R 11. Lots of issues with licensing, catalogs, restores, performance, etc.. Can't really depend on it anymore. Glad I found Macrium. Been looking for an Acronis replacement and it looks like I finally found it. I even met with the Acronis techs at a tech conference and they literally blew me off with my problems and questions. All they wanted to talk about was their cloud service, which I would NEVER use.

Using the latest Acronis Backup version 11.7.50073, I can't even use the bare metal restore anymore on my own system because there are no Intel i219-LM drivers and loading them manually into the bootable media doesn't work either. I have to install an old Intel PRO1000 if I need to restore. I am done with Acronis.

 

Hi,
@dcol: You won't be disappointed. I've using MR Free for many years now and it has never let me down.

Cheers, *Wink

 

*Ditto

 

Mega Dittos *Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto*Ditto

 

+1 on keeping one's backup images on an external device connected to the computer only during backups, or, restores.

 

Just did a backup of my C drive in Macrium and it took 2 minutes. The same backup this morning took 3 hours with Acronis.
Although I tried a restore and Macrium could not get to my NAS. Maybe I setup something wrong. But the backup was fast.

 

Two minutes seems too fast unless not much to backup and very fast pc?