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ShadowProtect Desktop or Macrium Reflect?

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f0dder:
MerleOne, p2v isn't that big of a deal - but v2p certainly is!

rjbull:
I don't know if Macrium has a refund policy, if yes, you don't risk that much by buying the real product and ask a refund if it doesn't work with your setup.
-MerleOne (December 22, 2009, 06:39 AM)
--- End quote ---

Quoting the Macrium Purchase page:

30 Day Money Back Guarantee:

All purchases from us come with an unconditional guarantee. If you are not satisfied with one of our software products, contact us within 30 days for instructions on obtaining a refund.

--- End quote ---

tranglos:
Now that the discount for ShadowProtect is active (thanks, Mouser!  :-* ) the choice hasn't become any easier :)

I have a slight preference for the UI in Macrium Reflect. It is more compact and requires fewer clicks to perform common operations. In ShadowProtect, for example, it takes way too many clicks through a wizard interface to mount a drive image. On the other hand, Macrium performs its tasks in modal dialog boxes, while ShadowProtect UI remains available while it is creating an image (a minor thing, until you want to move the window out of the way while the program works: with Macrium you can't, with ShadowProtect you can.)

ShadowProtect starts up immediately, while Macrium takes a long time to start, as it analyzes all disks and partitions. (Why not do it in a thread once the main window is already available?).

Both apps create a base image of almost exactly the same size: 24 GB for some 39 GB of data on my system disk, using the default medium compression level. Both take about 9 minutes to create the base image - no perceptible difference there.

However, one point against Macrium seems to be the size of an incremental image. I created a base image first (24 GB), then created an incremental two hours later. During this time hardly anything changed, except a few more messages received in TheBat, and a few more files in Firefox cache. I wasn't even using the computer for one and a half of those two hours. Yet the resulting incremental image is 242 MB in size, roughly 10% of the base image size. That's huge, given how little has changed on the drive. At this rate it could quickly become impossible to keep the daily incrementals.

I'll now replace Macrium with ShadowProtect to see if its incrementals are smaller (since I didn't think about it before!)

On edit: The ShadowProtect incremental, also done after about 2 hours of moderate computer use, is much smaller, only 74 megs. This is still surprisingly large though! (well, it's surprising *to me* :) ) A notable difference seems to be that SP created the incremental in bare seconds, while Macrium took a minute or so. Of course the difference in sizes and times may be due to whatever inscrutable changes Windows may or may not have written to disk during the mostly idle two hours, as MerleOne noticed below

One other minor point in favor of ShadowProtect: Macrium popped up a focus-stealing modal dialog box as it was writing the incremental image (the main UI was not running at the ttme). The dialog allows you to cancel the operation within a brief timeout, but it would be better done as a tray notification. By contrast, the ShadowProtect service performed the incremental task completely in the background, without putting up any UI at all.

MerleOne:
If you ware saving your system partition, such a size for a differential backup is quite normal nowadays, since Windows is always creating lots of files for just about anything.

I have noticed something about shadow protect : you can desactivate the license on a given computer.  It would be nice to know if you can then activate it on another one without limits, so you might protect several machines one at a time (according to what the license permits).  With Macrium, I am not aware of such a mechanism : once activated, it probably remains so.  Macrium user may share their experience on this ?

tranglos:
I have noticed something about shadow protect : you can desactivate the license on a given computer.  It would be nice to know if you can then activate it on another one without limits, so you might protect several machines one at a time (according to what the license permits).  -MerleOne (December 29, 2009, 02:39 PM)
--- End quote ---

You can probably do it, but wouldn't it become tiresome rather quickly? With having to remember which computer the license is activated for at the moment. Also, I vaguely recall reading in their forum that there is a limit to how many times you can reactivate the license.

With ShadowProtect at least you can ask; the Macrium authors limit support to registered users only (but you can probably write to their sales address).

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