Backup practices, Macrium Reflect Free

For me the reliability of the free version was so great I switched to the paid version on a black friday sale they had (I wanted the extra restore speed).

 

I've also used the free version for a couple of years with no issues whatsoever. I switched to the paid home edition for speed, and believe me daily incremental backups are really fast as well as restore times between 2 to 4 minutes, and my computer is 9 years old, I guess with the latest hardware one could get things done even faster. I've never ever had a failed restore, it just works...

 

Thank you @Freki123 and @Osaban for your feedback.

I've played some more with this since yesterday and continue to be nothing but thoroughly impressed with it. It will backup my full bitlocker Windows partition without me first having to suspend bitlocker before booting into the recovery environment. Very nice! I've also discovered scheduling is available in the free version, and I can mount backups to explore them That all said, I see myself purchasing the full home version to unlock all the features, including the faster backup speeds that you both have alluded to.

Thanks again!

 

I need to jump in here for a reality check on the "speed" enjoyed with Reflect, especially as FREE compares to HOME or WORKSTATION.

FREE only offers FULL & DIFFERENTIAL backups while the LICENSE also offers, in addition, INCREMENTAL backups. INCREMENTALs are, by their nature, faster... why, because they are significantly smaller, especially over time, than DIFFERENTIALs. Other than that there is no significant speed difference between the two by design. I don't know whether FREE offers the CBT feature that LICENSE has. This is a feature that will shrink the size of INCREMENTAS a bit... probably not noticeable by the average user. Anybody with large database files taking often INCREMERNTALS of these files will indeed notice a difference in the INCREMENTAL speed and size.

The main difference between FREE & LICENSE is in the restore speed. LICENSE includes the RDR (Rapid Delta Restore) feature while FREE does not. This feature makes a HUGE difference in image restoration speeds... unless you're restoring from an ultraFAST NVMe SSD to another ultraFAST NVMe SSD. The difference will not be as noticeable (but still be be faster) with that particular hardware inventory.

That's probably a good description about the two versions as far as speed is concerned

 

Thank you RollbackFrog for the comparison.

Honestly I didn't expect scheduling or even Differential options to be available in the Free version, which for me makes it that much more impressive, besides the most important consideration for any backup/restore solution: Reliability. For my needs, which are pretty basic, only creating backups maybe once/month and restoring less often than that, the free version would suit me fine, but I will most likely purchase the Home license to enjoy all the benefits it offers.

 

When I meant speed it was for me about the restore speed (Rapid Delta Restore). Should have been more specific

 

The last gap fill-in...

I was not a Reflect user prior to 2015 when I got a hold of a v6 BETA version that had slipped into the wild. This was the 1st version that had ever offered a feature like RDR. I had been seriously testing an imaging tool known as AX64. It had a similar approach to RDR but had implemented a totally different method to accomplish the "difference" restore used by RDR. My interest was peaked due to the fact that I was a "snapshot" software user (Rollback RX, EAZ Fix) and was looking for a fast restore type of operation. At that time (and still somewhat today), snapshot software was a bit dangerous, wasn't a real backup solution and didn't work with the Windows System properly... when it failed, it failed big time in a disastrous way... I wanted to get away from it and still maintain a quick restore solution.

Anyway, Macrium's RDR feature was so impressive that I left my snapshot application solutions in the dust and embraced Reflect full force... I've never regretted that decision. Currently I use Relect not only as my primary System backup solution, I also use it as my "snapshot" tool when I'm doing serious System testing. It's so quick at restoring recent snapshots that I don't even miss my previous high-speed snapshot restoration solutions... Reflect does it all.

My secondary backup solution to Reflect is "Drive Image Backup & Restore" (previously "Image For Windows") from Terabyte Unlimited. They have since also developed an RDR-like image restoration feature that is quite quick. For simple imaging, DIB&R is more than capable of doing what you want, for more sophisticated processes, it becomes a bit more cryptic in its use.

Both are excellent imaging applications in their own right...