Macrium Reflect vs Acronis

Hi, after having easily 'cloned' 2 drives using the free trial of Macrium Reflect7 that for whatever reason were not readily being done by my Acronis True Image 2020, I went ahead and ordered the 4-pack Home license , now on sale for 20% off ($111.95) with free update to Reflect 8 when that come out; seems like a good deal to me.

Does Macrium Reflect have anything similar to the Acronis True Image 2020 'Bootable Media' that is put onto a USB drive, and selected as the bootable drive during startup to do drive cloning in a pre-windows environment?

I've made the Macrium Reflect 7 Bootable Rescue Media on a similar USB thumbwheel drive and tested it out. I like the pre-windows environment (similar to the Acronis Bootable Media), but I don't see where you can clone a drive, just looks like you can copy partitions or recover by re-storing a previously made cloned image, etc. Am I missing something or is that it?

Thanks, I didn't notice that. Can't wait to try it.

Fabler2 said:

Select 'Backup' then Clone this disk.

- - - Updated - - -

OK, I looked at the Macrium Reflect Bootable Rescue Media, and I see where you can clone directly from this in a non-windows environment.... I'm starting to like it even more, but still have a few questions to those more savy of Macrium:

1) My Macrium Reflect Bootable Rescue Media was made with Win Pro 10 64-bit but the rescue media says something like Win Home 10 64-bit? Where did Windows Home come from? (both rescue media's made at work and at home, both with Win Pro 10 64-bit say that same thing, Win Home on the rescue media?). I thought it would build the rescue media using the wim file from the computer that it was being built from? I have either Win Pro 10 or Win Enterprise 10, don't even have Win Home?

2) Can the rescue media be used on any computer, or just the computer/drives it was made from? Meaning, if I use it mostly for clone backups, can I use it to clone drives on other computers?

3) I still have to try the Rescue Media clone, so I'll do that at work in the morning .

4) I'm now thinking of doing whole-drive image files and will play with bringing them back to restore a (blank) drive.

Thanks everyone for feedback....this site is a great resource with very helpful people.

Blast2020 said:

OK, I looked at the Macrium Reflect Bootable Rescue Media, and I see where you can clone directly from this in a non-windows environment.... I'm starting to like it even more, but still have a few questions to those more savy of Macrium:

1) My Macrium Reflect Bootable Rescue Media was made with Win Pro 10 64-bit but the rescue media says something like Win Home 10 64-bit? Where did Windows Home come from?

When booting from the Macrium rescue media the 'Home' in the title bar refers to the edition of Macrium Reflect, not the Windows used as the source of WinRE. There is no difference between the WinRE boot environment of Windows Home or Pro so Macrium just reports the version number and the bits, nothing else.

2) Can the rescue media be used on any computer, or just the computer/drives it was made from? Meaning, if I use it mostly for clone backups, can I use it to clone drives on other computers?

I haven't yet found a machine that can't be booted from the rescue media, regardless of what machine made it. I have made images of many different machines with just the one rescue USB to boot them all. A case in point is the screenshot above, it's a Linux Mint VM booted from a Macrium rescue ISO.

3) I still have to try the Rescue Media clone, so I'll do that at work in the morning .
4) I'm now thinking of doing whole-drive image files and will play with bringing them back to restore a (blank) drive.

I prefer to make images rather than clones. A year or so back I had to replace a dying HDD with an SSD. Before it died completely I managed to make an image, which I restored to the blank SSD and carried on with everything working as before.

I have been using disk imaging software since MS-DOS 5. Used a bootable floppy with Norton Ghost for years before I moved to Acronis 2009, 2011 and finally 2017. I have backed up AND restored (a backup is not a backup until you successfully restore from it) Windows XP, Windows 7 x64 and Windows 10 1903 x64. I wiped the drive before restoring just to be sure the restore was successful.

This was all done from the Linux rescue media, I have only installed Acronis to create the rescue media then un-installed it. I have never understood the point of having drive imaging installed on your OS. The whole point of drive imaging is to be able to restore your OS in case it won't boot hence the rescue media. ATI rescue media, at least the versions I have used have always proven reliable in my many years of imaging. I do agree that it is becoming enormously bloated which is why I am still using ATI 2017 Linux rescue media. Upgrading to the latest version of anything isn't always an upgrade, I'm still using Windows 10 1903 with no issues whatsoever.

That said, I have also tested Aomei, R-Drive, Macrium and Paragon rescue media. After image creation I wiped the drives then restored Windows 10 1903 x64. Each time Windows 10 booted with no issues. Conclusion: They all do the same thing, just the GUI is different. Pick one, test it thoroughly, then stick with it.

If anyone can recommend a good imaging software for Linux other than Clonezilla I would like to hear about it. All the ones above I mentioned I also tested with Linux Mint and Lubuntu - Linux wouldn't boot after restoring.

Haven't tested any of these on SSD, that's a time consuming pet project for another day.