At a glanceThere’s no easier, more reliable imaging backup software than Macrium Reflect. It’s a bit on the pricey side though.
I’ve been using Macrium Reflect in one form or another for almost as long as I’ve employed the top-rated R-Drive Image — decades. It’s been every bit as reliable when it comes to Windows backup, and that’s saying something. I also find the interface a bit more attractive than its rival’s.
The only tick in the negative column has always been price, though there’s a feature-limited free edition floating around out there. More on that in a bit.
Macrium Reflect Home Edition is an imaging program. That is, it creates container files with all the sectors containing information from a drive or partition. That includes the OS and applications. It will even copy blank sectors if you want a perfect duplicate of the drive/partition.
Beyond that, it will also create the same type of container, but using only the files and folders you choose.
Reflect creates full (everything), incremental (all sectors changed since the last full or incremental backup), or differential (all changes since the initial full backup) images. You can also define how many versions are retained and at what point older files are purged.
Macrium Reflect is absolutely rife with options.
Reflect doesn’t offer the nearly universal VHD as a backup container option. However, it does include an option for vBoot, which creates VirtualBox virtual machines from your Macrium backups, and includes the VirtualBox run time.
On the other hand, with Reflect installed, just double-click on a Reflect image (.mrimg) file and a dialog pops up offering a choice of drive letters for the image it will mount under Windows itself.
It would take quite a while to go through all of Reflect’s options, but there’s a plethora of them including: granular scheduling, network share definitions (user name/password), extremely granular retention rules, NTFS reparse rule behavior, passwords, compression settings, notifications, etc.
There are also some unique options for how backups are appended to existing backups, automation scripts, and a background service that locks your backup images. The program even supports optical discs, for goodness sakes.
And of course, there’s boot media. In this case Windows PE/RE. There’s no Linux option — one of the few things I miss in Reflect.
I mentioned that Reflect Home is pricey: $80 for a perpetual license with free minor upgrades and a year of support, or $40 yearly. That’s a lot more than the $45 one-time purchase for R-Drive Image, our current top pick in imaging backup.
However, unlike R-Drive image, which is pay only, Macrium Reflect is available in the aforementioned, feature-limited free version, though it was discontinued by Macrium in 2023 and you can’t get it on the company’s website.
Instead, search “Macrium Reflect Free” and you’ll find it available from download aggregate sites such as TechSpot and Filehorse. Macrium does offer free 30-day trials so you can kick the tires of Home Edition and other versions. You should.
As I said up top, the program has been uber reliable for me. For a brief time I used it instead of R-Drive Image, and for a longer period of time, I used them in tandem. Yes, two images. When you need to work on a client’s system, you can never be too careful.
In my testing for this article, Reflect impressed me with its speed, stability, and complete lack of glitches — a breath of fresh air after a few recent reviews. Boot disc creation and operation were as smooth and drama-free as the main app — another area of weakness with many backup programs.
Also, as I confessed above, I think the interface is one of, if not the best in the business. It’s logical, attractive, as well as highly informative, and will likely sit better with many users than R-Drive’s.
Using the word “Home” in the title is doing a disservice to a program that’s this speedy, reliable, and feature-laden. By all non-enterprise criteria, Macrium Reflect is definitely “Pro.” The issue for many will be the price, but that’s for you to decide. I will say, that if you do plop down the coin, you’ll almost certainly be happy with it.
