Macrium Reflect Image To Iso

[Renita Lukins]

UsingMicrosoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) Macrium Reflect creates point-in-time persistent images of your system. In Addition to creating backups of all partitions required to backup and restore Windows, you can backup all or selected drives and partitions on the PC.

The first page of the Image Wizard shows the selected disks and partitions to be included in your Image and allows you to choose a destination.

In the Destination section, enter the target backup folder.

You can type the destination path or click the browse button to choose a folder. The destination path can be on a local drive or network share.

Macrium Reflect retention rules provide a powerful and flexible way to manage the lifetime and storage space used by your backups.Choose how backups are matched, and how retention rules are applied to the target folder

Disk Images are purged if they contain exactly the same Partitions as the current Image. Partitions are identified using the unique Disk ID stored in sector 0 of the disk and the Partition sector offset. Note: For GPT disks the unique GPT disk GUID is used instead of the Disk ID

In the example below, before retention, there is 1 Full backup, 1 Differential backup and 6 Incremental backups. The retention rules are set to retain 4 incremental backups. After retention, the most recent 4 incremental backups are retained. Deleting the oldest 2 incrementals would cause the backup chain to be invalid as the oldest retained incremental requires the previous 2 incremental backups to complete the chain. To ensure backup integrity the 2 older incremental backups are consolidated with it to create a new incremental backup.

When purging Incremental backups, if the backup set only contains a Full backup followed by Incremental backups, then this option causes the Full backup to be 'rolled forward' to create a Synthetic Full backup. This is also known as Incremental Forever.

Select this option to run the retention rules before the current backup.

Note: in Macrium Reflect v5 the current backup set wasn't included in the purge calculation when purging before the current backup. In v6 the current backup set IS included. This means that if you set the retention count to 1 Full backup then all of your backups will be deleted and a new Full backup created.

Automatically remove the oldest backup set(s) in the target folder if the free space on the drive drops below the GB threshold.

Note: The free space threshold is actioned dynamically. If the free space available drops below the threshold then the running backup is temporarily paused while older backup sets are purged.

The backup Save Options Dialog enables you to save your backup options as a re-usable XML definition file. This is essential for many operations in Reflect including Scheduling and creating Incremental and Differential backups

Regardless of your PC environment, leaving your backup definition files in an insecure location is bad practice. The effort required to ensure your files are secure is minimal and doesn't impede day to day usage of Macrium Reflect.

Backup definition (.xml) files are used to initiate backups either interactively by using Macrium Reflect directly, or as scheduled tasks using the Windows Tasks Scheduler. If you save your backup definitions to a publicly accessible folder then these can be edited by standard users and could potentially compromise your system. In addition, it's also possible to create batch files, either MS-DOS, PowerShell or VBScript, to automatically run during your backups as described here. A restricted user with bad intentions could easily create a batch file to run with elevated privileges when a scheduled or interactive backup runs.

The default, and recommended, location for your backup definitions is folder 'C:\users\\documents\reflect'. When running Reflect for the first time this location is created and defaulted when saving. See Backup Save Options for more information on how to save your definitions.

In the above example only SYSTEM, Dev (the Macrium Reflect user) and the Administrators group can access files contained in the folder. Standard users are denied access and cannot modify or create files.

We strongly recommend that, if not using the default location. you ensure that NTFS permissions are used to prevent unauthorised modification and creation of files in your backup definition folders.

Note: A popular misconception is that backup definition files should be saved to the same folder as your backup files. This is incorrect. Backup definitions are only required to create backups and have no other purpose. They are not required for restore.

I mean, maybe if you use Macrium, but you must make a forensic copy and not an intelligent sector copy. But with Macrium, I've found that one, to be safe, should use the same version number that was used for backup as to restore. If not, I've seen that Windows won't boot and their own software won't fix the Windows boot problems.

But recently, I wrote back a Macrium Reflect image of my encrypted hard drive, not a forensic copy, and when I entered my Veracrypt password, it was not accepted. I tried booting off my rescue disk, and that also did not work. I tried booting off of Gandalf's rescue disk, and using veracrypt on that disk, and choosing to use the backup header, that also did not work. So I question whether the backup header in the volume actually works, or if that version of Veracrypt actually worked.

So what I did is I restored a Clonezilla image that was one month older, and that accepted my veracrypt password and booted. So, great. I made a new rescue zip from that and wrote that to my usb stick, which I found out must be FAT- or FAT32-formatted. I think I had all the information I needed.

So then, I went to restore my Macrium image again to the hard drive, the one that was the newer one that hadn't been working before, I also had SSD trim turned off, but after restoring that image and entering my VC password, it worked! Why? I don't know, but I wonder if Macrium actually wrote the 16MB Veracrypt partition data at all, because if it didn't work, I was going to use Clonezilla to just write that 16MB from the working image to this one and hope for the best. But it worked now, password taken, so I didn't need to use my rescue disk or veracrypt in Gandalf's rescue disk. I don't have a viewer to actually see all the bytes of data to see if Macrium actually wrote anything or not, or how it actually wrote back data, but I'm glad I got this working, or I might have had to contact @idrassi and offer some cash to get his help to fix my problem, wondering if I would even hear from him or which channels I'd have to communicate with him over. I really wonder if the backup header embedded in the volume is actually there, or if the mechanism to use that actually works.

I guess there are a couple of good things about Macrium. 1) It can be faster to give you a decrypted system than Veracrypt's decrypting process. To do it, in Windows, run Macrium Reflect, backup your system, which will now be in an image file but unencrypted, then write it back. You probably want to save as forensic copy and not intelligent sector copy, just to be safe, and sometimes, if you use a different version to restore than the one you used to make an image, Windows won't boot and not even their "fix windows boot problems" will fix it, but using the veracrypt rescue disk to write back the windows binaries (or however they put it), then that will work.

2) Not just that, but when you use macrium to write to an image file and then write back, it changes the sector size from 512 bytes to 4096, which I think speeds things up.

Recently, win7 using vera 1.25.9. I used mac reflect to write intelligent sector copy to external drive image, then write back, turning ssd trim off. At the vera boot screen, entered password, was accepted, but then windows said "Error: No bootable partition found". When I restarted, at the vera screen, just pressed Esc, and windows booted fine. Weird.

Mind you, I was decrypting veracrypt 1.60 using Camellia-sha512, and the system froze! I've also had the system freeze that wasn't even encrypted, so it's a problem with the driver itself or the Veracrypt program. Truthfully, because I didn't know if one or more of my files were now buggered, I decided to use Macrium to quickly make an exact forensic copy backup, and then write it back, just in case the system froze again. But that's important - to make it a forensic copy.

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