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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

https://preview.redd.it/etlk3phoc01c1.png?width=746&format=png&auto=webp&s=4ab362a741c16756172863bb86fe23a9c03dcf64

  • 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

https://preview.redd.it/9ny8xb2ve01c1.png?width=338&format=png&auto=webp&s=4bdf237d72c1805e08b9b14372a494bb2114f6aa

  • 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

https://preview.redd.it/xflccfrpc01c1.png?width=772&format=png&auto=webp&s=5ba74131d22653bd4d6435fe738f4e8a8b371eb3

  • 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):

  1. RescueZilla with 78GB image (default settings with compression 6), increased compression to 9 and got only 77GB. Not worth it.
  2. 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.
  3. 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):

  1. Veeam - 3 minutes for default compression and 7 minutes with extreme compression. I even don`t see settings for verification image after creation.
  2. Macrium - 5 minutes with default compression and 9.5 minutes with High compression, both numbers with backup + verification operations.
  3. 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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