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
- 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
- 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
- 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):
- RescueZilla with 78GB image (default settings with compression 6), increased compression to 9 and got only 77GB. Not worth it.
- 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.
- 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):
- Veeam - 3 minutes for default compression and 7 minutes with extreme compression. I even don`t see settings for verification image after creation.
- Macrium - 5 minutes with default compression and 9.5 minutes with High compression, both numbers with backup + verification operations.
- 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.
But if I need only few files from backup Windows backup doesn`t provide such options.