How to use Macrium Reflect to create an image of your PC hard drive. Launch Macrium Reflect from your Start menu. Windows 10 help; Load More. Best Reviews 2019 Windows 10.
Our Windows App of the Week isn’t something you’ll probably have to use very often—we hope—but it’s a great tool if you’re upgrading your system and need to move everything from an old hard drive to a new drive.
In fact, that’s exactly what I did this weekend when I swapped out one of my secondary hard drives for a new (larger) drive. Though I could have just copied all the files over using Windows’ File Explorer, that means I’d have to come back to my computer from time to time to deal with the annoying prompts that tend to pop up when you’re dragging a huge chunk of folders to a new location.
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Macrium Reflect (free) helps you bypass that, but it’s even more useful when you need to make a backup (or clone) of an entire drive—especially if it’s one you’re actively using, like your primary Windows partition. With Macrium, you can easily create a backup image or just copy the drive’s entire contents, partitions and all, to a new location.
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The program’s interface can feel slightly complicated if you’re not used to making grand data migrations on your home system. However, Macrium does a good job of presenting the process graphically (and providing plenty of prompts to prevent you from accidentally overwriting the wrong hard drive).
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Macrium also helps you make a piece of rescue media—either a CD, DVD, or USB drive—that you can use to launch the application in the rare event your computer’s Windows OS won’t start up. You can then restore a recent disk image you’ve created or, possibly, even a “just-installed” image of your OS you created that has all of your favorite tweaks and apps already set up.
To keep yourself from forgetting about the ever-important process of backing up your drives’ contents, Macrium can also run its imaging process on a set schedule. You can have it create full backups—which take awhile—or both differential and incremental backups, which only take into account files that changed since your last full or incremental backup.
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Macrium Reflect
Developer(s)
Paramount Software UK Ltd (trading as Macrium Software)
Stable release
Operating system
Windows XP SP3 or later Windows Server 2003 SP2 or later
Available in
English, German
Type
Backup software
License
Freemium
Website
www.macrium.com
Macrium Reflect is backup utility for Microsoft Windows developed by Paramount Software UK Ltd in 2006. It creates disk images and file backup archives using Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service to ensure 'point in time' data accuracy. Macrium Reflect can backup whole partitions or individual files and folders into a single compressed, mountable archive file, which can be used to restore exact images of the partitions on the same hard disk for disaster recovery, or a new hard disk for data migration.[1]
It has received numerous favorable reviews,[2][3][4] and is often recommended and used as an example program for cloning and backup tutorials.[5][6][7][8][9]
1Overview
Overview[edit]
Macrium Reflect can create full, incremental and differential backup images, or selectively back up individual files and folders. Data is compressed and encrypted in real time using LZ-based compression and AES encryption algorithms. Images can be mounted as a drive letter in Windows Explorer and restored using a custom Macrium Reflect Rescue CD. In the event of a partial or complete system loss, this image can be used to restore the entire disk, one or more partitions, or individual files and folders.[10]
Macrium Reflect can clone one disk onto another, and restore an image to new hardware. Using a pre-created Macrium Reflect Rescue CD, critical drivers required by the new system can be inserted into the image taken from the old system, making it compatible with the new hardware.[11]
Macrium Site Manager[edit]
A central management console is available which enables scheduling, restore and monitoring of multiple networked computers running Macrium Reflect using a Web browser user interface.[12][13]
Free edition[edit]
An unsupported free edition is available for home and commercial use. It lacks some features of the full versions, such as incremental backup (though it includes differential backup), but still has some features found only in expensive commercial products.[14][15][16]
References[edit]
^Horowitz, Michael. 'A hit and a miss from The Tech Guy'. Computerworld. Retrieved 14 March 2017.