Hey there,
I haven't been terribly active here in a while, but am going to be building a new pc with my son at christmas time and wondering about imaging software. I want to ensure he picks up some good habits.
It seems Macrium is the imaging software of choice still. Free or paid for version is the question that I have.
Let's discuss.
-Pat
I have both, been using Free for a year or so. I've just bought Home and installed on one of my machines.
It's the same software, you can switch from Free to paid for just by entering a product key to enable the Premium features. As such Free works just as well as paid-for for most purposes.
What don't you get in Free? Image Guardian and Incremental backup are probably the two most significant Premium features. Neither are 'essentials' (Free does have Differential imaging). For the other differences, see the comparison table here:
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect Free
Minimal advantages to the paid version, at least in my case. I say that after I bought it at half price a month ago.
The "file backup" section is very clunky compared to apps designed for that purpose.
Do you want to do incrementals?
Any interest in virtual machines?
Macrium Software | Product Comparision
Rapid Delta Restore might be worthwhile, if you do restores repeatedly rather than occasionally.
Paid has restore to dissimilar hardware, but I haven't read anything saying it's magical or can do anything you can't do on your own with a little preparation (driver related).
Paid has ransomware protection of image files (Image Guardian), but I'm not sure it does anything not done by Malwarebytes or Windows Defender
The viBoot feature that allows you to run a Macrium image as a Hyper-V virtual machine is included in Free.
Yes, but how much it speeds up the restore depends on how similar the image is to what's already on the target drive. There's no advantage if you are restoring to a drive that's empty.Rapid Delta Restore might be worthwhile, if you do restores repeatedly rather than occasionally.
...or even without any preparation. W10 is very good at finding the right drivers should it find itself on totally different hardware. Ever taken a drive out of one machine and plugged it into another? I have, usually works fine.Paid has restore to dissimilar hardware, but I haven't read anything saying it's magical or can do anything you can't do on your own with a little preparation (driver related).
It does, it locks your image files and blocks anything other than Macrium itself from modifying or deleting them. Mind you, if your images are kept on an external HDD that you remove once the imaging is complete, then they're safe from tampering anyway.Paid has ransomware protection of image files (Image Guardian), but I'm not sure it does anything not done by Malwarebytes or Windows Defender
From a developer point of view - paid (always support good products)
From an average user point of view - free.
Thanks for the feedback guys.
I don't restore images very often. In fact, my son's current PC was build in Dec of 2016, and we installed Windows 10, and we haven't had to restore any images or reload the OS since then. He does a very good job of maintaining his PC.
I'll just stick with free for the time being. I only pull occasional full backups. Free version does what I need.
I just spun up a Win10 VM (since I am out at a conference), and played with Macrium 7 and it's just like I remember it. Easy to use.
-Pat
I use the free version on all PCs apart from my desktop PC where I wanted the protection of image guardian. Apart from the paid for features already mentioned, the full version has a feature to assist in redeploying a Windows system to a different PC.
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