I have been using Reflect v5 and then v6 for years without issue. My upgrade to v7 went relatively well, a few minor issues. However, my experience with v7 is VERY negative I have 3 drives that I back up (M.2 SSD, SATA3 SSD, SATA3 HD). The "up to 60% faster" backup times are what made me want to upgrade to v7, and all my backup times are slower than v6. For the M.2 SSD and SATA3 SSD, the times are marginally higher, and I could deal with this. But my SATA3 HD times are more than double. It used to take 4.5 - 5.0 hours to do that backup, and now the backups rarely finish. They run for many hours, once over 12, and then Reflect will crash. This has happened three times. I finally got a backup to finish last night - the only difference is that I turned off Avast, but it still took 10 hours (twice the v6 time). v6 ran fine with Avast enabled.
Do not upgrade to v7 yet. It is not mature enough to replace v6.
Unfortunately, Macrium support is not taking ownership of the issue - I fear I will be demanding a refund and going back to v6. I hope they don't force things in that direction.

@jgranto

Thanks for posting. Very sorry you are having problems.



Please be assured that we are not only taking ownership of support problems we are also working around the clock to resolve them. We have tested on many different physical and virtual environments and the software was also released in a closed Beta. Unfortunately the multitude of hardware and software combinations makes it is very difficult to ensure there are no problems.
   
I understand your frustration and if the slowdowns are caused by Macrium Reflect it *will* be resolved and very quickly. We also have a constant battle with AV software interfering with the Backup process. We have witnessed Symantec treating v7 as 'Untrusted' even though the software is signed with a Symantec digital certificate. So, can I please ask you to ensure that Macrium Reflect is white-listed from any security software to ensure that this isn't contributing to your problem.

We are also working on Direct Disk I/O and some changes to CBT to allow writes directly through on backup target disks. These changes could be relevant if the backup target disk is the bottleneck in the backup process. All modifications will be available in the next few days.

Thanks for your understanding and patience

Kind Regards

Nick

Macrium Support

See our reviews on

I totally disabled the AV product (Avast) and the SATA3 HD to SATA3 HD backup, which used to take 4.5 - 5.0 hours in v6, took over 10 with v7. I did not whitelist - I disabled. The AV product is not the issue with the length of time, although it may be the reason Reflect crashed in previous attempts. I am using Avast Free, v17.2.2288 (build 17.2.3419.59), which is the current version. So, what we are dealing with are two different issues:
#1: Backups taking forever and Reflect crashing when AV is enabled (which may be AV-related).
#2. Backups taking forever while completing successfully when AV is disabled. Forever = twice the amount of time as compared to v6. This would not be AV-related. Since neither my hardware or software changed, this would indicate a serious performance issue with v7.

Hi 

Thanks for getting back.

I understand your frustration and the slowdowns *will* be resolved and very quickly.

Kind Regards

Nick

Macrium Support

See our reviews on

Let's hope so Nick.

My FULL backups are taking 45 minutes longer with v7 for my OS drive which is SSD and backups going to NAS.  What is strange is the SATA drive backup also going to NAS where my data is is actually quicker than in v6.

UPDATE:

Reflect had a new update today, which I installed (and did the required reboot). I also pruned down my drive data, deleting hundreds of GB that I no longer really need (decreasing the size of the backup). I totally disabled Avast (disabling the service) and performed the backup, taking 4.5 hours.

Under v6, this backup (which was several hundred GB bigger and with Avast enabled) took about 4.5 hours. Based on the decreased data, I would guess v7 to be 20% slower. I did not test v7 with Avast enabled, since that has historically caused it to crash. I will try that later.

jgranto,
Wondering whether you are having Macrium verify your backup, and what level of compression you are using. See my thread (http://forum.macrium.com/Topic12137.aspx). I have been having speed issues as well w/v7, and have narrowed the performance decline down to the verification stage of the backup. Macrium says no changes have been made to verification between v6 and v7, but it seems to me like there is some interaction going on w/v7 between compression and verification that is causing major performance issues.

I sent them the logs from a backup yesterday and await their response. I am using the same XML backup definition files, so the backups are using the same settings as v6. I do set high compression. Now that the speeds are only 20% higher things are at least usable - although I do want to do a test with Avast enabled to see if Reflect crashes. I will post their diagnosis when I get it.

Thanks. Would appreciate you posting any additional info you get back from them w/regard to the logs.

Per FatMonkey, the slowness does appear to be with the VERIFICATION process. The backup itself was about on par with v6 speeds.

I ran another SATA3 HD to SATA3 HD v7 backup of 1.52TB and it took 6.5 hours with AV enabled. v6 could do 1.58TB in 5 hours with AV enabled. v7 too 4.5 hours to do 1.22TB with AV disabled.

As you can see, having AV enabled makes a big difference, as well. AV and the verification slowness seem to compound each other. No response yet from Macrium with respect to the logs I sent them, but I don't expect to hear from them until the normal work week.