In that case, it wouldn't be possible to restore an archived Diff from the archive drive. The only exception would be if you were doing something like capturing a Full backup and then several Diffs, and you were only moving old Diffs over to the archive drive to free up space, without ever copying the Full over there. You can learn more about MIG, including how it works with Robocopy, at the MIG KB article.īut to answer your main question, if you need to be able to perform manual image moves within Windows Explorer, MIG will block that while it's active, so you would need to disable it at least temporarily when you wished to do that, which you can do under Other Tasks > Macrium Image Guardian settings.Īs a follow-up to the above, if you need to restore an image that is no longer on your primary hard drive and has instead been moved to your 'archive' drive, why do you move it back to your main hard drive first? You should be able to run a restore directly from that archive drive. If it weren't for the option to allow Robocopy, MIG would have prevented that - but since that's a widespread use case, Macrium allowed RoboCopy to get special treatment, againwithin certain constraints. If you were using Robocopy to have your secondary destination always mirror your primary destination, Robocopy would have to delete/modify some backup files at the secondary destination. But for example, suppose Reflect had automatically purged or consolidated some older backups at your primary destination according to your retention policy. If that other location is another local disk, then Macrium Image Guardian can be used to protect both your 'primary' destination and this secondary location. The reason is that a somewhat common use case for Reflect is for the user to have a script that calls Reflect to run their backup job, and then calls Robocopy to replicate their Reflect destination folder to some other location. However, within certain constraints, MIG will (by default) allow Robocopy to modify backup files.

Macrium Image Guardian is a feature that blocks anything except Macrium applications from modifying your Reflect backup files, including you attempting to manually delete them within Windows Explorer. RoboCopy is a command-line tool built into Windows you can see how it works and what it can do by opening Command Prompt and running 'robocopy /?'. I think you're confusing RoboCopy with Macrium Image Guardian.

Robocopy for mac