Reflect Free can be used by businesses....
Macrium Software | Macrium Reflect FreeMacrium said:
It also has facilities for direct booting of VM Images if you use HYPER-V....
That is not a Premium feature, it is included in the Free edition. Coming soon in v8 Macrium will add support for Virtualbox.
... incremental ... backups plus one or two more things ... Image Guardian...
Yes, those two are Premium features, Free does include Differentials though.
Yeah, it's all going to come down to the user. Personally, the free version does what i need it to do. But then again, I don't have a lot of "data" stored directly on my workstation.
- My email is in gmail
- My browser bookmarks are stored in the cloud via google
- My pictures (from my phone) are sent automatically to OneDrive, from my Camera they go on a file server
- Vast majority of my dataFiles are in OneDrive due to owning 365...so I worry less about frequent backups of those
My desktop hosts mainly games and virtual machines. I keep the games and the virtual machines on their own partition. My VM's are just for testing and experimenting with. So, if they get lost, it's no big deal. My games all have cloud saves, so worst case scenario I redownload them again....so I don't have any concerns with backing those up.
I just looked at Macrium and I have only run 2 backups on my new box. One on Jan 1st as it was clean, just the drivers and OS. Another was on Jan 3rd, after I installed most of the software that I use and the games I didn't want to have to redownload.
My files on my file server are another story, and those are replicated to a second physical drive, with a 7 day rotation and they get copied out to multiple external drives. This isn't a ton of data.
Yeah, I just wanted Image Guardian.
On Win 7 with Acronis, I got hit with ransomware, twice. Acronis encrypts it's backups automatically, so I had no trouble just rebooting to the Acronis bootable media, and restoring from a backup.
Unfortunately, Acronis went haywire and added everything and the kitchen sink, which bloated and seriously bogged it down.
Even so it took me a year to decide that Image Guardian might be a "good" thing to have on MR.
I ran MR free till it went on sale like a week or two ago.
This thread is more of a rant than an issue. I was surprised they had RDR turned ON by default.
Last edited by Ghot; 19 Apr 2021 at 11:51.
Surprises aren't surprises if you look at the comparison matrix of products HERE at Macrium.
RDR is a proven technology. I have been using RDR exclusively since the v6 release in 2015... it has never failed. For RansomeWare to modify file content on your System, it must change the file's MetaData in the process. It's that data that Reflect uses to make its determination about whether to restore anything in the RDR mode... for me it has been trouble free since its inception (I also Beta tested it prior to the v6 release).
Due to the speed of RDR, Reflect has become my System snapshot tool of choice, not just an imaging program for backup purposes. As a previous Rollback RX user from the old days, after studying and using Reflect's RDR, I made a conscious decision to dump Rollback RX and use Reflect as my primary snapshot tool. As a snapshot tool I probably use Reflect's RDR about 200-times a year when testing software and doing other "dangerous" things to my System... it's been excellent.
Like I said... it sounds fantastic. For those with huge backups, it's probably a godsend.
Me... I'm an old man. I'm still running a 2.5" SSD, when I have the capability to run NVMe.
I have tiny backups (18GB).
I'm not discounting RDR, but like usual, I will be a late adopter.
Here's the latest Macrium Reflect guide's section on RDR.
The free version is a good tool, but I value incremental a lot, it essentially allows one to have more frequent snapshots of data without all the overhead of each one been a full backup would entail.
File and folder also has use for me as I have data I want to backup that doesnt have its own dedicated partition. I also use it for outlook pst files, my documents. pictures as well (all not on OS drive).
I do a reasonable amount of testing, and general tinkering. Incrementals are essential to me as "snapshots" (forget forever MS restore points, another subject not for here). They are very quick, my system on average 1:30 or so. Rapid Delta Restore makes it quick and easy to put back to a known state prior to testing/tinkering if (when) I screw up. My average size image is 18-20GB compressed at 60%-ish, so that's a 28-30GB OS and files/data. I can RDR that in 2-3 minutes. Other consideration, though minor in the scope, is SSD wear of FULL vs RDR restore. Depends, of course, on frequency, size, etc.
Both RDR and Incrementals make the Paid well worth it. Plus of course the Image Guardian.
A lot depends on your individual needs and use. No need to buy a 12 speed blender when a whisk will do.................
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