Backup is in the eye of the disk holder. Today, we have a long, thorough review of Macrium Reflect 7, a free system imaging software for Windows, covering setup and installation, backup, clone and restore options, backup procedure, bootable rescue media creation, restore from live Windows PE image on BIOS/UEFI hardware and redeployment test in a virtual machine, editable XML configuration files, scripting, scheduling, many other features, and more. Have fun. https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/macrium-reflect-7.html Cheers, Mrk
@Joxx - The FREE Recovery Media images Linux Systems pretty well. I did some extensive testing with ext<n> partitions (mostly with Linux MINT), discovered a serious sizing bug, and working with Macrium it was fixed a while back in both v6 and v7. The bug didn't affect restorations, it just created much larger images than necessary. Some functions do not work with Linux (mounting images) but as an imaging solution, it works pretty well.
I have used Macrium in the past, beginning way back at version 4. My main imaging program is Terabyte IFL. I recently downloaded Macrium latest version a few days ago. Created the rescue USB media and tested out to make sure it would boot. I like the interface, etc., and the latest version has some good features for a free version. My question is, I booted up and created an image of my entire drive. The data to be imaged was 16.71GB on two partitions. I have a Dell laptop, Inspiron E1705, USB 2.0 ports using a Western digital Elements 1TB 2.5" portable external drive. I was a bit surprised to see after image was created, that it took 35 minutes to finish. i compared this with Terabyte IFL and Terabyte takes a little over 9 minutes to create the same full disk image of two partitions with 16.71GB of data. Is that odd that Macrium takes 4 times as long? My drive is defragmented as of yesterday, and chkdsk was performed from within the Macrium boot media before imaging using the command prompt, all checked out fine, no errors. Is it just different programs take longer? I really like Macrium, I used it the other day to image my wife's Dell tower, she has USB 3.0 ports and it imaged her system all partitions, Boot, ESP, OS and Dell image partition, all consisting of about 45GB of data and it was done in about 13 minutes. Now I realize the difference between mine and hers is both CPU speed USB 3.0 transfer rate, her system is pretty snappy. But even with my old Dell laptop, it has 1.73GHZ Intel Dual Core T5300 CPU and 4Gb of memory, and it is fast for my needs. I am stumped about the overall time difference of image creation. I can image my OS drive C: with Macrium in a little over 8 minutes, but today imaging the full drive, both partitions, it took 35 minutes. The files on my storage D: partition are just software files, some videos, etc., and that partition I have my windows pagefile set up of about 3.5GB, but that shouldn't have anything to do with the time factor. I appreciate any insight as to why it may take so much longer than IFL as a comparison. Bottom line is that Macrium is an excellent program, but much slower than IFL on my machine. Thank you
@Jim1cor13 all depends of the hardware and HDD/SSD unit. on my i5 8thgen with SSD and 8gb RAM , macrium takes 5mn to fully backup my 27gb system; and around 30sec for an incremental backup few days later.
Can Macrium Reflect 7 Free make a "factory restore" partition which you can boot into from BIOS? I have tried AOMEI OneKey, which are supposed to do exactly this, but it fails on some of my laptops...
