Windows Backup: Macrium, Veeam and RescueZilla
Windows Backup: Macrium, Veeam and RescueZilla
I would like to share some metrics.
Pre-story:
I have been Macrium user for long time and when they decided to cancel support of free version I was looking for a new tool. I need Macrium only for backup of my PC.
Found Veeam and it was great in the beginning, but when I faced real issue with PC and had to restore my image that was created by Veeam a one day ago - I lost everything.
Already described here https://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments/17s3v5p/win11_restore_failed_error_zstd_decompress/
I have never had such issue with Macrium. But for me that was enough to rid of Veeam from my PC once and forever. After that I started noticing such posts https://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments/mhv5gz/where_veeam_failed_me_macrium_to_the_rescue/ so, probably I am not alone who trusted Veeam and it failed.
Let`s make it short. Just my comparison.
Macrium
- never failed me
- very heavy GUI, don`t like it
- but powerful, easily can create job for backup a few drives
- unfortunately no option in free version to send notification when job done
- awesome feature that I can mount image and get just few files from there
- USB drive for backup and restore
Veeam
- like GUI
- like speed
- like email notification in free version
- also great experience with mounting image and get separate files or folders from there
- free version doesn`t support more than 1 job - don`t like this
- bad support - if you have some issue - you are idiot, also nobody helps you if you are not premium member
- can not find NAS in network, for get my image I have to enter manually all path to folder with images, one wrong symbol - it will not tell you that you made mistake (Macrium easily can see your locale network like in explorer)
- USB drive only for restoring, backup only in windows agent
RescueZilla
- don`t like it, works only from USB
- maybe if I need it right now backup or clone drive is a good solution, but for urgent cases not useful in my opinion
- also it is not possible to get some files from image
- for me just weird unix tool
According to image size (Disk C is used for 159GB):
- RescueZilla with 78GB image (default settings with compression 6), increased compression to 9 and got only 77GB. Not worth it.
- Macrium with default recommended compression 83GB and with the same settings but from USB drive - 90GB (don`t understand why, maybe some system files are not in RAM), so probably will use only in Windows GUI. And high compression - 82GB. Not worth it.
- Veeam - 87GB with default compression level and 70GB with extreme. Great compression, but also you can get error like I got during decompression.
Speed image creation (Disk C is nvme gen4 and images were stored in another local nvme gen4, cpu 13700KF):
- Veeam - 3 minutes for default compression and 7 minutes with extreme compression. I even don`t see settings for verification image after creation.
- Macrium - 5 minutes with default compression and 9.5 minutes with High compression, both numbers with backup + verification operations.
- RescueZilla - 9 minutes for compression 6 and 11 minutes for compression 9, also if you want to verify image - it will take 8 minutes more, so overall for backup + verify = 17 minutes.
According to speed and image size overall Veeam looks awesome, 70GB for 7 minutes for Extreme compression. But I don`t trust.
After all these experiments and taking into account how great was experience with Macrium previously, I will continue using Macrium and probably will buy licence when they stop supporting free version, I see no other options.
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If you just want a compressed system image, Windows has this functionality built in. Control Panel > Backup & Restore (Windows 7). It's basic but free. It doesn't support versions or multiple images so you have to change folder names if you want to keep more than one image.
But if I need only few files from backup Windows backup doesn`t provide such options.
It's a vhd, you can mount it and browse for files