Backup/Recovery tools - Acronis vs Macrium

Please forgive me for not reading the whole "Window 10 Recovery Tools" thread before posting this, but that's a very long thread.

I am a long time user of Acronis True Image. Lately I've run into a few peculiarities that have me looking at alternatives. A number of people have recommended the free version Macrium Reflect, but I need the paid version to meat my requirements. I would like more information to help me decide. (Other products can be suggested, of course.)

My requirements are:

1. I have to run the backups on 3 devices - 2 desktops and 1 laptop.
2. The laptop backup goes to a NAS drive.
3. I need to run full disk image backups on all 3 devices.
4. I need to run file/folder backups of some files on the NAS drive from one of the PCs.

I've done 1 recovery using Macrium and 2 using Acronis. I had a couple false starts with Acronis because understand the process. I don't remember how easy the Macrium process was. I found configuring the backup process less straightforward with Macrium than with Acronis, but I recently discovered that Acronis has an exclusion list and was excluding files from its "Entire PC" backups. (Grrr!) All recoveries were successful.

I've had to recover old data a number of times. I've done it successfully from the Acronis backup and have walked through the process with the Macrium. Both work with no problem. Macrium mounts the backup image faster than Acronis, but I don't think it gives an option of the drive letter to use in mounting.

Tthe free version of Macrium Reflect does not take file/folder backups, and the cost of a 3 (actually 4) device license for Macrium Home costs quit a bit more than a 3 platform license for Acronis.

The Acronis doc says only file/folder backups can be taken to a NAS, but I'm taking "Entire PC" drive backups of the laptop to my NAS drive. I know for a fact that the Acronis stand-alone recovery systems cannot access a NAS drive. I would have to copy the backup to another drive before doing a drive recovery. I have not idea what the Macriun capabilities are regarding NAS.

I suspect I will continue using Acronis, but I would like to hear what other people think I should do.

cereberus said:

Or use File History Backup which is built into Windows for #4 designed to do this.

I just tried that. I had ignored it in the past because I thought it allowed only the standard user folders and libraries. I just tried adding some of the folders on my NAS drive and it failed with error code 0x80070032. I looked for possible causes but could find none that match. (Yes, I tried turning off my security package.) I'll try this again later, but continue using Acronis for now.

BTW, in item #2 I should have said "over wireless". I've read that Macrium does not support this. Acronis doesn't support it, either. However, I've read a couple posting that describe adding wireless support to WinPE so I suspect the capability could be added. I think the Macrium recovery system is WinPE-based; I know that Acronis has both a Linux-based and a WinPE-based recovery system. Do people mod the Macrium recovery system? I know people mod the Acronis WinPE recovery tool so I don't see why this support could not be added.

For No# 4 you can use SyncBack Free , or one of the two paid Versions.... it does Scheduled as well and seems to work well ,though I just upgrade to Win10 and have Run it on 10 yet.

I recommend Paragon Hard Disk Manager Pro. It's not exactly cheap but very reliable and comes with every feature one can imagine.

cereberus said:

Backing up over wifi is likely to be very slow. Probably easier just to backup image to an attached drive, and manually copy over wifi to external target at your leisure.

It's a bit slow, but not unreasonable - especially for incremental backups. What you described would certainly be faster, but there are some logistics problems. If by "attached drive" you mean an external drive, well, we don't usually have one attached to the laptop. There's no reason we couldn't just attach one whenever we want to take a backup. (That would mess up any scheduled backup, but the laptop is powered up so irregularly that a schedule wouldn't work anyway.) If by "attached drive" you mean an additional internal drive, we don't have one. We could carve out a 2nd partition in the one drive we have - essentially cut the drive in half - and backup to that partition, but then we would have the same problems of copying off of the laptop (over wifi) that we have with backing up over wifi.

You don't want to put backups or System Images on the same physical Drive , even if on a different partition , the drive dies and you lose both sets of Data that way.