Question Macrium Home vs Commercial?

pnartg

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I do music production using Cubase and FL Studio and video production using the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. I have lots of VSTs, add-ons, plugins, etc for all these tools and I also use this PC for my basic email and web-browsing, and various writing and journaling activities. The PC that all this runs on is a big desktop Lenovo Thinkstation. It only has a 1 TB SSD drive which it mostly uses to store the programs and their associated files and data (musical instrument VSTs often have 10's or >100 GB of data). The video and music files I create live on an NAS on my network and are independently backup-up so I only need to back up the PC. This PC is typically run 24/7 because I work at it 14 hours a day and at night it runs backups, deep-anti-malware scans, or housekeeping tasks for the other PC's and devices on my network.

Because of all the work I've done installing and configuring software for this PC and the importance of my projects I want easy, reliable, total system backup and recovery. If the PC or its SSD die I want to get a new PC or pop in a new SSD and pick up where I left off. I'm told Macrium can do this. I want to buy a fully-supported (not free) version but I'd like to know whether the Home version is adequate or whether I should spring for the Commercial one?

Thanks in advance.

PS - PC's and related hardware change all the time. This PC is 10 months old. If it was destroyed and I had to get a new one how exact a match does it have to be to the old one for the recovery to be fast and smooth? (E.g. I'm thinking some hardware drivers won't match)
 

USAFRet

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I use the Paid version on my main system, Free on the others.
My systems get a nightly or weekly Incremental or Ful image, depending on the system.
My main...a Full followed by nightly Incrementals. I could recover the system...any individual drive, to the state it was at any day in the last month.

The free version does Full and Differential, the Paid version adds Incremental.

Home vs Commercial?
The Paid Home is almost certainly enough.

Be careful of your expectation of popping this drive into a whole different PC.
Supposedly, the ReDeploy function in Macrium can do this, but I have never tested it.


 

USAFRet

Titan
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PS - PC's and related hardware change all the time. This PC is 10 months old. If it was destroyed and I had to get a new one how exact a match does it have to be to the old one for the recovery to be fast and smooth? (E.g. I'm thinking some hardware drivers won't match)
The only real defining part is the motherboard.
Change that, and a full reinstall is likely needed.
 

pnartg

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The only real defining part is the motherboard.
Change that, and a full reinstall is likely needed.

How would I get some clarity on that? Because if my PC blows up next year and I have to buy a new one I have to buy what they're selling and there's no way to predict what motherboard Lenovo will be using at that time.

I'm backlogged on projects as it is. So if the system goes down I'd need to be back up and running as quickly as possible. What do most people in that situation do - just have a spare PC with matching hardware handy? That sounds expensive.

If backup/restore tools like this are that dependent on specific motherboards then is it better to think of them as "disk drive" recovery tools instead of "system" recovery, as they market themselves?
 

pnartg

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I know nothing about your software.......but I'd think the Home version would be fine. I'm not even sure of the Commercial version differences.

They market the commercial product as designed for "mission critical" systems. That's how I think of mine. I was hoping someone here could help me cut through their marketing hype.
 

USAFRet

Titan
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How would I get some clarity on that? Because if my PC blows up next year and I have to buy a new one I have to buy what they're selling and there's no way to predict what motherboard Lenovo will be using at that time.

I'm backlogged on projects as it is. So if the system goes down I'd need to be back up and running as quickly as possible. What do most people in that situation do - just have a spare PC with matching hardware handy? That sounds expensive.

If backup/restore tools like this are that dependent on specific motherboards then is it better to think of them as "disk drive" recovery tools instead of "system" recovery, as they market themselves?

BUT...motherboard fails are actually pretty rare.
Much more likely for a drive, GPU, PSU, whatever.

Moving an OS drive, be it the actual physical drive, or a clone, or an Image, to a new motherboard...is ALWAYS an iffy proposition.

Look into the ReDeploy function in Macrium. It may or may not work.


What I do is have all my data on other drives.
Projects, plugins, all that stuff.
The only thing on the OS drive is the OS and applications. At most, a day or two for a reinstall.
Plug the other data drives in and off you go

I did exactly this last week.
Moving from an older Win 10 system to a new Win 11 system on all different hardware.
OS and application install on the new system, and move the data drives over. Photo/CAD/video.

The only problematic drive is the OS. And I just plan for a full reinstall of that, in the very very rare instance of the motherboard dying.
 
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Here's the marketing hype I see for "commercial" version:

  • Removable media imaging and cloning
  • Create images of running Windows OS
  • Restore non-booting systems
  • Scalable and navigable log view interface
  • Boot backups in Hyper-V virtual machine
  • Direct disk cloning
  • WinPE 11 rescue media
Here's the hype I see for "workstation": I was unaware of it.

  • Backup your entire PC or workstation to a single compressed image file
  • Backup files and folders to a single compressed archive file
  • Rapid Delta Cloning increases cloning speed by copying file system deltas
  • MBR and GPT disk support
  • Recover partitions and entire disk images with just a few clicks of your mouse
  • Mount images in Windows Explorer for easy item level recovery
  • Rapid Delta Restore recovers your images in minutes or even seconds
  • Protect your backups from ransomware with Macrium Image Guardian
Most and possibly all of those features are in the home edition. I'm not sure about Hyper V as I don't use virtual machines. I think Delta Restore is in the home version, but I don't use it either. Not sure about the usefullness of scalable and navigable log view interface.
 
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How would I get some clarity on that? Because if my PC blows up next year and I have to buy a new one I have to buy what they're selling and there's no way to predict what motherboard Lenovo will be using at that time.
That is a perfect use case for virtualization. Unless your workflow depends heavily on GPU performance, you can install a hypervisor (Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VmWare, even Windows Pro), and keep your installed software inside a virtual machine which does not depend on your current hardware. If something happens - get a new hardware, install same hypervisor, restore your VM. No need to reinstall Windows, applicatrions, settings.
 
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I recommend downloading the free home version and start using it. It's easier to find out what you want to use and if it's in that version. Anything you choose that is not in that version will not work and give you a message to upgrade. The free version is actually very adequate to protect data. But there are useful tools that are not in that version. Retail on the paid version is only $69 lifetime, and as soon as you download the free version you will start getting discount offers. You can clone and backup files and folders as well as system. Mounting the image in Explorer is very useful because you can access the backup just like your hard drive. I use mine on an external drive because you can connect it to another machine if you have hardware problems on your primary machine. That way you can actually work with your files without any interruption. They also make an Enterprise version which is way overkill for your usage. The backups are also customizable; i.e., how often you want a full backup, incremental and/or differential,, schedule, etc. I have used a lot of these programs I think the home version is better than the paid versions I have had in the past. It also is very fast.