Macrium Reflect PIREP

RJM62

RJM62

Touchdown! Greaser!
Joined
Jun 15, 2007
Messages
13,157
Location
Upstate New York
Display Name
Display name:
Geek on the Hill
I've been testing Macrium Reflect backup software for not quite two weeks of a 30-day trial. The software having passed every test I could hurl at it, I decided to buy it last night.

The short version: This software does everything it's supposed to do, and does it reliably and with no drama. I also tossed a support question at the publisher as part of the test and got a reply in about 20 minutes.

The slightly longer version: Macrium Reflect rivals higher-priced backup solutions in its functionality, options, and reliability. It also has a nice, intuitive interface, decent documentation, and sensible options. It installed and has run flawlessly on my Win10Pro machine (Intel i5-based).

Macrium Reflect creates image backups, bootable clones, and file / folder backups. It supports differential and incremental images and rapid cloning once the first clone is made. Forensic imaging and cloning (even unused sectors will be backed up) is also supported as an option. All functions can be scheduled to run unattended, and multiple schedules are supported. Image password-protection and password-encryption is supported, which I highly recommend given the current prevalence of ransomware.

The backups do seem to take more time than Acronis, and the images are a little bigger using the default (medium) compression. My initial 178GB image took a bit under 30 minutes (writing to a USB 3.0 external HD) and took up about 109 GB. The daily incrementals take two or three minutes. I haven't timed the weekly differentials. Refreshing the clone after about a week took about 10 minutes, including verification. Images can be mounted, assembled, browsed, and made writable if needed.

Images and file/folder backups can be made to a local disk, external hard drive, or network share. I don't know if tape drives are supported. Clones, of course, must be made to a hard drive that is compatible with the machine being backed up.

The recovery environment can be burned to a bootable CD,* written to a bootable flash drive, and/or or installed as a Window boot option. Of course, the media should be tested to make sure it boots and that the backups are accessible (especially if backing up to a network share). The recovery environment is based on WinPE and the interface is intuitive and straightforward.

Macrium also offers an almost fully-functional free trial (for obvious reasons, the restore to new hardware function is disabled in the trial) that does NOT require a credit card.

The software is available in multiple versions (Home, Workstation, etc.). They also offer a free version for home use that doesn't support incremental or differential backups, restore to new hardware, or possibly some other features (I didn't test it).

Long story short, I really can't find anything I don't like about this software. It does what it's supposed to do and does it better than some much-more expensive backup solutions that I've tried. If you're looking for a local backup solution, I suggest you check it out.

Rich

-------------------
* In a previous thread, I'd mentioned that the boot CD didn't work. However, I tried it again and found that the problem was actually an error on my part in setting up the BIOS boot order.

 
I'll second that. IMHO Macrium is heads above Acronis. I've been using it since MS started the Win10 nagware and Acronis was clear that their older product would not work if things went astray.

The only note is that it doesn't run on Apple if that's important to you.
 
For cloning, I switched from Acronis to Macrium a few years ago, because I was having trouble getting Acronis to work reliably. I'm not a heavy user, but I haven't had any problems with Macrium.
 
Palmpilot said:
For cloning, I switched from Acronis to Macrium a few years ago, because I was having trouble getting Acronis to work reliably. I'm not a heavy user, but I haven't had any problems with Macrium.
Click to expand...

I never had much luck with cloning using Acronis. I used to use Casper for that. But Casper's not supported on 10, either. In fact, it looks like they haven't even updated their Web site, much less the software, since Casper 8.0 came out.

Oh, well. You snooze, you looze. Macrium's a work of art.

Rich
 
Oddly enough, under XP, I found the free versions that Acronis produced for Seagate and Western Digital to be reliable for cloning, while the paid version was not! However, they didn't seem to be Win 7 compatible, which is what drove the switch to Macrium.
 
So, does this mean I can ditch Norton Ghost? It'll be a happy day when I can.

dtuuri
 
dtuuri said:
No, but then I have Vista, drive a Saturn and a Ford Ranger too. Should that bother me? :dunno:

dtuuri
Click to expand...


Vista was usable if you disabled UAC. Some of the later updates fixed most of the worst bugs, too. And Saturns were great cars. I've owned five of them. What UAW and GM did to Saturn are why I doubt I'll ever buy another GM car. As for Ford Rangers, I have no experience.

The Macrium Reflect trial is free and does not require payment information. I really can't think of a good reason not to give it a shot if you hate Ghost.

Rich
 
Late ditto on Macrium. If you need point and click simplicity and don't want to do things the hard way with Clonezilla, Macrium is the shizz.
 
Just noticed this thread. Making a bootable copy is how I've always done my backups for personal computers. At one time I used Casper but for a long time now I've been using a product I call Minitool. The actual name is a mouthfull, but here's the site.

http://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/partition-wizard-home.html

The free version is not a "trial" version. It works until you decide to stop using it. It does just about everything a person would normally want to do, but if there's something really fancy that needs doing they have specialized versions. I paid for the Professional version for some reason I can't remember now. It's buried in some drive I haven't taken the time to look for so just downloaded the free version to do a backup on an 8 inch tablet I just got. I put a 64 GB eMMC drive on a thumb drive. It's a byte for byte copy and bootable. Free.
 
I've never found "byte for byte copy" to be the hard to find feature.

The hard to find feature or set of them, is the ability to resize things correctly, and have them still boot properly, with zero interaction other than to set the sizes desired. Including resizing both partition AND filesystem onto both bigger and smaller physical disks.

Then add in network support for images to be both saved and retrieved from a plethora of network filesystem types. Hell, someone should even put Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, and Microsoft's OneDrive in as options if they're building one today.

Acronis for many years was the resizing master but they slipped a bit over the years. And they went full "give us a lot of money" mode. Their original boxed stuff still works great on systems without UEFI or newer filesystem types and was what, $40 back in the day? I was sad to see it go downhill and then behind a bigger paywall.

Macrium seems to get the job done now. Too bad it's not smart enough to know its going on an SSD and do any other work needed to align those correctly and get the manufacturer's software into the OS and activate it. :)
 


The spash page at the link I gave above gives the impression it only supports Windows up to and including 8.1.

This page shows it also supports Win 10.
MiniTool Partition Wizard Free Edition 9.1

  • Best All-in-One Free Disk Partition Manager!
  • Over 16,000,000 Users Downloaded from CNET!
  • Satisfy All your Demands of Basic Disk Partition Management!!
Support OS:Windows 10, Windows 8.1/7/Vista/XP 32-bit and 64-bit
User Rating:
Editor Rating:​
 
MikeS said:
Just noticed this thread. Making a bootable copy is how I've always done my backups for personal computers. At one time I used Casper but for a long time now I've been using a product I call Minitool. The actual name is a mouthfull, but here's the site.

http://www.minitool.com/partition-manager/partition-wizard-home.html

The free version is not a "trial" version. It works until you decide to stop using it. It does just about everything a person would normally want to do, but if there's something really fancy that needs doing they have specialized versions. I paid for the Professional version for some reason I can't remember now. It's buried in some drive I haven't taken the time to look for so just downloaded the free version to do a backup on an 8 inch tablet I just got. I put a 64 GB eMMC drive on a thumb drive. It's a byte for byte copy and bootable. Free.
Click to expand...

I was a Casper fan for a long time, but I have to wonder whether they're still maintaining it. The clone I made with Casper 8 using Win10 completed without errors, but wouldn't boot. Maybe I could have made it work by twiddling with some settings, but I really couldn't be bothered. I would have bought another license anyway, so I decided to spend the money on something that worked natively.

I've never heard of Minitool before. It looks like a competent tool. If I were still in the tech support end of the business I'd give it a try. But now I have Macrium and am happy with it, so I'll leave it be. It's one of those programs that just does what it's supposed to with no drama. I like that sort of software.

Rich
 
> "It's one of those programs that just does what it's supposed to with no drama. I like that sort of software."

Me too. Casper was like that but I think I had stumbled across Minitool by the time Casper wanted some money for something so tried out the free version of Minitool. Absolutely has been without one single hiccup over the last three or four years that I've been using it. Everytime I use it I wonder that something that works this well is free.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top