However, I cannot avoid thinking it it sound a like a promotional ad for Macrium. But that is ok, if you can live up to your promises. Having recently tried several different backup software, I am still not satisfied with what they offer. Why? Simply because they all try to do too many things. Thus they often are not able to doing any one thing intuitively (easy), properly, fast. They all try to satisfy as many different scenarios as possible, which for all practical reasons, they are unable to do. Instead you get a mediocre solution that is hard and time consuming to maintain. And it certainly isn’t free.

What am I talking about? I suppose that in these times of cheap data storage, there is little need to physically try to recover a hard disk and even less need to compress whatever you have on it. That is, if you have made your regular backups! So what I believe most people are looking for, is a small and fast backup solution, that always works, and is easy to access. This is where almost all “professional” backup solutions fails. The typical scenario should be the following.

Backup: (a) Select a disk or partition. (b) Make an image of it to an external HD/NAS, in the fastest way possible. Tell the user exactly what’s going on while it’s happening (i.e. time, files used and remaining). Provide sensible error, should they occur. There is no need for forensic cloning or other extra features, just copy what’s used. That’s it!

Recovery: (c) Attach external HD/NAS (d) Use your systems file browser (e.g. Explorer in windows) browse to image you want to recover from. (e) Either recover whole disk/partition or just copy the files/directory you want to recover. (g) Done!

The ONLY software I have seen so far, that is capable of doing anything near that, is a homemade and single executable, 352 KB (!) software called “Drive Snapshot” made by Tom Ehlert. The only thing missing from making this a huge success, is a slightly modernized UI and an explorer plugin like that used in EaseUS (~300+ MB), so that you can browse the files on the image.

On the contrary, although your (Macrium) has a relatively easy to use UI, it is far from minimalistic and it is lacking in many fundamental respects, like: easy file browsing of backedup image, correctly estimating time remaining, providing human intelligible and clear error codes, and showing the user what is being done. Everyone hates the lying green flashing windows progress bar and Macronium have two of them!

Online backup is interesting and incredibly convenient, but it does have its challenges.

The first is availability. If the backup software cannot access the storage from the rescue environment for whatever reason, be it because the environment is a proprietary one that needs special software to access or because of the more fundamental network connectivity issue, not being able to reliably get at your backup means you cannot restore when you need to.

The second is data size, specifically the cost of getting that data over the network. When large streaming video or voice is played, UDP is the protocol used. The easiest way to explain this is to say the packets of data are fired at your browser several times just to make sure. There’s no effort to synchronise data at all – if one frame gets dropped well the video player will just work around that.

You can’t do that with backup data. Fire it enough times to be sure it got there isn’t good enough unless the other end is verified, too. The alternative is to use a protocol that makes sure everything gets there – TCP. This has a performance overhead.

So getting that data there is going to take a while in software terms. In hardware terms, you are at the mercy of the quality of connection between you and the other end. If you’re like me, it’s not great!

Unfortunately, the bad news is that image sizes are going to get larger, not smaller, as disk sizes increase, so these factors are only going to get more relevant.

The only way to mitigate this is to take a full backup first, then take incremental backups from there. That said, you still need to read the remote backup file. Even taking into account the fact that most home broadband connections are asynchronous and that these reads will happen much faster than the writes, that data still needs transferring and that still takes time.

So right at this moment, I don’t think there’s an ideal easy solution to this problem. I’m aware some imaging products offer cloud based backup solutions and have probably looked at these issues before – you could always investigate. If your connection is good enough, you won’t notice the performance isssues (they apply to local gigabit networks too, but they’re so fast relatively speaking you get good performance from them).

That said, I think to an extent computing might be moving to a solution that does solve the problem. Many devices (tablets, smartphones etc) store data in the cloud in perpetuity. Even browsers can sync with the cloud. In these cases, the important data is backed up anyway. The user has very little locally to image – should they lose their device or it fail, they simply get another one or access their data through another device.

Given you can do this on the PC too (browser sync, dropbox et al) maybe its fair to say that disk imaging has a niche for those who need entire systems backup, and cloud provides the general backup for those who want to back up user files and not whole PCs?

I’m no business analyst. Only time will tell if the cloud fizzles out, but it’s interesting to think about!

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