Windows 10: Can Macrium restore an MS System Image?

Somewhere I saw someone state that Macrium can restore MS System Images. Anyone know if it can?

I can't ask on their forum as you can only register after you buy the product and I tried emailing their contact - L: [email protected] but the emails bounce as spam. Not very potential customer friendly but I haven't given up on them yet.

I backup all seven computers (win 7, 8.1 & 10) at least once a month so I've got a slew of backups for each. They are all MS system images. I recently ran in to an issue that forced me to to clone an HD instead of restoring like I intended. I used the free Macrium program to do that and thought I'd give them a shot.

BUT, I don't want to lose my old stuff. Particularly some significant points such as the initial install, last backup before say upgrading my 8.1 laptop to 10. Stuff like that.

:)

 

Restoring Windows 10 Image using Macrium Reflect


In addition to the above. Here's my suggestion in step by step.
I assume you have Macrium Installed in your current HD and already made a backup copy.

1. Connect your new HD via USB port and boot up.
2. Run Macrium, click on Restore tab then select the Backup Image that you made to restore
3. click on "select a different target disk" then select your new HD as destination
   
   
   
4. Proceed to restore then Shutdown and disconnect the old HD and replace with the new HD
5. Boot up with your new HD.

 

Can Macrium restore an MS System Image?

The MS backup and the Macrium backup seem to work on quite different principles.

MS back up all the necessary files on a partition to a vhdx, and on restore will copy them back. The file history seems to be regarded as unnecessary. It does mean that on restore there is no fragmentation though. It's not so much a system image as a system copy.

Macrium back up all the used sectors and restore them to the same position in the partition, with 'inteligent sector copy' (the default) all sectors marked as unused will be skipped. This will preserve all fragmentation, but does mean that you can't recover deleted files (for that you'd need to use their forensic image). Macrium do make one change to the restored disk, it adds a log file to record the restore.

 

Can Macrium restore an MS System Image?

Thanks to all for the responses

I was afraid of that as I couldn't find any way to pick a system image in the macrium restore area but figured it was no harm in asking.

Thanks Bree for his good suggestion. Guess all those restore / backup to macrium will take awhile, but is a solution and might force me to 'prune' some of those backups down to the ones I really might need.

I haven't had any real restore problems with MS. I think maybe 2 over the last 10-12 years. The recent one had to do with restoring an old laptop that I had converted to Linux. I had trouble restoring that I think due to grub being the loader.

The only other one was pre-system image with xp when I couldn't restore after a mother board swap (actually same laptop around 2010 or so).

[edit]
And yes, I'm aware I can mount the backup and copy any files I want. I do resort to that from time to tiem.