Backup and Restore with Macrium Reflect  

Ryan1991 said:

I am planning to buy the macrium software thats why i asked because i was not sure difference between differential and incrementals. Just one last question, Can we restore a system image backup made using macrium to different computers?

The Free version meets most people's needs for sure.

However, the Paid Home version adds the following key features (amongst others).

1) Ability to do incrementals (discussed here a lot - nice to have but differentials are quite adequate.

2) Rapid Delta Restore (and Cloning). This is truely awesome. If you restore an image from a backup (including diffs/incs), it only restores what has changed rather than restoring everything. This is really fast.

3) Macrium Image Guardian - online images are protected against malware.

4) Macrium Redeploy. You asked above if you can restore images to a different PC. Sure you can do that but unless you haves sysprepped PC before making backup, you might run into driver issues (although Windows 10 is good at sorting such things).

Macrium Redeploy sorts out drivers for you when you reinstall image on different PC. In effect it does a sysprep on the fly.

5) You get access to the Macrium Support for 1st year (after that you would have to pay an annual fee but tbh if yu get issues, it is normally in first year.
To me, all these features make it well work buying the Home version.

As an aside, on another site, yesterday I saw an Acronis agent dismissing Macrium saying it was more expensive comparing it with the paid version, totally neglecting the Free version is adequate for most users. He had no idea about Macrium's features e.g. ability to mount images as a Hyper-V VM, and the above features in the paid version. Users of this forum know better and Macrium Reflect is overwhelming the Forum Favourite ( we did a poll a year or so back, and Macrium was used by over 60% of users, and none of the others iirc exceeded 15%.

For anybody planning on buying there is 20% off until the end of Feb (see tweet below).

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KabyBlue said:

I believe another feature exclusive to the paid version is the ability to encrypt one's backup images correct?

Yes.

Just restored a image with the Home version and it restored it in only about 4 minutes. The free version took about 10 minutes.

It's not the transfer speed. It is fast delta restore which only restores changed blocks rather than the whole partition.

kado897 said:

It's not the transfer speed. It is fast delta restore which only restores changed blocks rather than the whole partition.

I did not know that either. I only bought the Home version to support the dev's as there great program saved me hours of painstaking reinstalling Windows 10 something useless System Restore would fail at times (sometimes deleting crucial restore points randomly) when I needed it.