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I'm asking this because I just made a backup with Macrium Reflect (free edition) of my Windows 7 install, and the resulting backup file is really small.

The settings I chose were:

  • Intelligent sector copy (which copies only sectors used by the file system and ignores windows pagefile and suspend to disk (hibernation) files.
  • Medium Compression

On my C: drive (the system partition), about 25 GB are used in total. That is including all programs etc. The Macrium Reflect image is 8GB, which seems tiny to me.

So I'm kind of unsure about what exactly it backed up. Does anyone know if it creates a complete image of every file and all the settings on my system partition (excluding the windows pagefile and the hibernation files)? Will my system be exactly the same if I restore this image?

for clarity's sake, this is the backup option I chose:

enter image description here

2 Answers2

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I've been using Reflect regularly for over a year, and I confirm it does save everything and allows you to restore your computer, including all installed programs, settings, tweaks, documents, etc. (Assuming those documents have been on that same drive)

There are two pointers I can give you:

  • Could it be that you had highly compressible data on that drive? That would be a good explanation of how 25GB got compressed to 8GB.

  • Simply double-click the .mrimg file that Reflect created. This'll allow you to mount it as a virtual drive and see all the files inside. Explore it and compare it to your actual drive. Does it seem to have the same folders and files? Go into various program folders. Do they all seem to be there? That's a good sign the backup went well. If not, then you did something wrong.

If you want more assurance than that, your only recourse is to buy a second hard-drive, restore the backup to that hard-drive and install that hard-drive as the main hard-drive of your computer. But that's if you really want to be sure.

Ram Rachum
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I have recently used both AOMEI Backupper and Acronis True Image and have achieved at maximum compression a compression ratio of about 3.2. Your compression ratio is 3.12, which is not too far from mine.

The backup software compresses the disk by disk-blocks, which are usually 4 KB, and does it one-block-at-a-time. It cannot treat the entire disk as one huge file for maximum compression, because compression times will become much too long. Therefore the compression ratio is worse than that of one big file, which is probably why there isn't a big difference between medium and best compression.

Conclusion: The size of your backup file is entirely reasonable.

For a better compression you might before backup empty the Recycle Bin and maybe the Deleted/Trash folder of your emails (if large).

Last remark : The real test of the backup comes when the system dies. Ensure that you have a boot CD or USB and take care to test it well. It might not hurt to see if it does work, which you could test on some old computer or a virtual machine (can be aborted if not enough disk space, but at least see that it does start).

harrymc
  • 498,455