Macrium Reflect Free vs. Acronis TrueImage

Like they say on the Mandalorian, concerning Macrium...

"This is the way..."

Think of it as Beskar Metal for your storage device, lol.

[QUOTE=moondoggy;2374703]

Ghot said:

@moondoggy
Macrium is less bloated, and fast.
It does everything Acronis can, and more.
On Macrium's bootable rescue media there is a "Fix boot problems" tool. <--- awesome
I used Acronis for years. Now, you couldn't make me go back for any reason.
/QUOTE]

Thanks everyone for the feedback and what's in the quote above is what I found on the ask woody forum. I downloaded a copy and it is indeed easy to use and as long as a restore works flawlessly, free is good for now as I'll probably buy two licenses later on this year. One thing that concerned me about the comments made on the Ask Woody forum was the number of people that said that TI had failed them on a restore. I never experienced a failure but the fact that they've experienced failures is a concern.

It is a personal opinion, but buying a licence is well worth it just to get Rapid Delta Restore whereby if you restore an image over current installation, it restores by difference as is amazingly fast.

If you are going to buy two licences though, buy the 4 licence pack, as you get 4 licences for the price of two single licences,

At this very moment, you can get a 20% discount on Reflect Home. So, if you bought now, you would get 4 licences for the price of 1.6 licences.

The best time of the year to buy a Reflect licence is on November Black Friday, as they usually offer 50% off. Then you get an awesome 4 licences for the price of 1! They have run this offer for several years but of course, no guarantee they will in future.

ClippyBeer said:

I too have been a longtime Acronis True Image user. Have used versions 2009-2017 of the bootable media to backup and restore Windows XP, 7, and 10 successfully. It has never failed me. What prompted me to switch to Macrium? Acronis True Image no longer exists, replaced by a bloated monstrosity. I stuck with 2017 until I had the same problem fireberd did - I couldn't get the rescue media to boot on a UEFI laptop. Macrium booted up easily and allowed me to backup the laptop's Windows 7 install. I didn't want to keep using 2 different imaging tools so before I migrated to Macrium I tested it. I backed up an old XP BIOS laptop, a Windows 7 UEFI laptop and a Windows 10 UEFI desktop. I then wiped the drives of all those systems and restored the images I made. All 3 booted normally (a backup isn't a backup unless you successfully restore from it).

So I now only use Macrium for imaging my PCs. I've also heard negative things about Acronis' tech support - I don't speak from experience because I've never had to use it.

Testing an image restores is important as you say. I sometimes create a virtual hard drive and restore image to that, then create a dual boot entry. That way you can test it without wiping main drive.

pietcorus2 said:

Stopped using Acronis a long time ago , its bloated and unreliable !
Only one thing used to be very good ; the "Try & Decide" future ...........
Macrium is my big , absolute favorite , together with AoMei , second.
Macrium is my key for reliable , fine computing . Never failed to me , Win7/8/10 and now in 11............

My first choice is Macrium Reflect of course, but my second is Easeus Todo Backup. My main issue with AOMEI is that it does not properly preserve the partition structure (ignores MSR partition even though it is not really needed). Also you cannot restore more than one partition at a time when doing partition restore.

Although Reflect does not have try and decide, you can pretty much do the same by restoring to a virtual hard drive and crearing a dual boot entry so you can test the restore without affecting main OS.