Macrium Reflect Free Edition Review

Macrium Reflect Free Edition v4.2.2055



From the website:

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

The fastest disk imaging software is now available as a free edition.

Absolutely free! No strings! The only free XP and Vista compatible disk imaging software with BartPE and Linux based recovery options.

* Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS).
* Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.
* Built in scheduler.
* 32 bit and native 64 bit versions.
* Industry leading compression levels and speed.
* Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size!
* Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista.
* HTML log files.

My Analysis:

Macrium Reflect is very high quality stuff. It essentially lets you make an exact image of any individual partition or disk on your machine and save it to one of three locations for archival and backup purposes. These locations are -- Windows network locations, local/external hard disks, and CD's/DVD's. The interface is Explorer-like and very intuitive. The imaging operation uses a wizard interface to make things even simpler.

This program runs in Windows by using the Volume Shadow Copy Service, so you can make a backup of the very partition you are running Windows off of, as well as any other partitions on any disk in your computer (including Linux partitions).

You can restore partition(s) by using the restore feature in Macrium Reflect or you can create a rescue CD in the program itself. That means if Windows no-longer boots, you simply start your computer with the Reflect CD and then you can then recover partitions and entire diskimages with just a few clicks of your mouse.

There are useful compression options for the disk images -- high, medium, and low. The "high" option seems to compress the disk image by up to 50% (so an 80GB hard drive would back up to approx. 40GB).

Reflect did seem to slow down my computer when it was backing up partitions, particularly when the backup process was given a priority of "high", but in the imaging progress window, there are options to change the priority of the imaging process. I turned the imaging to low priority and press the "hide" window button and didn't really notice the difference.

Finally, you can also schedule imaging backups within the program itself on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis (you are given as much control over the schedule as you are given in Windows Task Scheduler). When you are stepping through the partition imaging wizard, at some point it will ask you if you would like to save the imaging settings as an XML Definition file. If you say yes, these imaging settings will be available for use in the "Scheduled Backup" tab of the program.

Go pro?

From what I've read, there are only two really compelling reasons to go pro (full version) --

1) If you're a business or corporate user, you will have to buy licenses to use the program legally,
2) With the pro (full) version, you can do incremental backups of partition images, which will invariably speed up the backup process.

Honestly, for a home user, there is probably not enough incentive to upgrade to the full version. After all, what is the real advantage in incremental backups when you can just schedule full backups in the middle of the night, using the built in scheduler? The speed of the backup is not a big deal at that point.

Download:

Official Download Link
Mirror Download Link