Macrium Reflect Pros and Cons

I was very keen on the idea of Macrium Reflect's Redeploy feature, enabling me to make hard drive backups to potentially restore to new computers without having to reinstall programs and settings, other than any different drivers on the new machine. It's very easy to install and get set up on my machine. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I downloaded and installed a 30-day trial of Macrium Reflect 8 on October 1, 2024. I was considering trying Reflect specifically for its Redeploy feature, and if it suited my needs, I was going to purchase their one-time license of the product. I spent a significant amount of time digging around in the software, eventually having to contact their support team to inquire how to use that feature. They informed me that this feature was not available in the trial, despite there being no mention of that anywhere in their product documentation.

At some point during the month of October, they evidently discontinued the one-time purchase option and now only make Reflect X available on a subscription-only basis. There was no notice of this, and when I finally decided to purchase a license for Reflect 8 (even though I had not been able to test out the primary feature I wanted the product for), I could no longer do so. It stands to reason that if I trial a software, that I can then purchase that very same product before the end of the trial, does it not? Their sales team seems to disagree. I contacted them to find out how I can purchase a one-time license, only to be informed that they are unwilling to offer the version and pricing that I was still within the 30 day trial period for.

This is in extremely poor taste, and I will NOT be recommending them as a software service unless they are willing to honor what I have very reasonably expected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Managing backup schedules per machine groups is very easy. The addition of intra-day backups has been especially helpful for versioning of directories that are shared company wide. The ability to mount a backup as a drive to recovery individual files has been invaluable on multiple occasions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

When attempting to do a system restore from inside the site manager page, the page will often time out before I get a chance to even begin a restore. If a system restore is needed, I typically need to access the computer, and start the restore process from inside of reflexct.exe, or by creating a recovery disk. This is further complicated by the fact that user accounts do not have the password to access the repositories for the data backups. I have needed to either create a copy of the system backups to external media for restoring or will need to temporarily change the permissions on the backup target. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Macrium Reflect is a free-to-use software for creating backups, rescue media tools, cloning drives, and restoring data. It's straightforward, intuitive to use, and has step-by-step guides for any task you want to use it for, making it easy for beginners. You can create backups at any time, or schedule Macrium Reflect to do them automatically once, daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you boot your computer. You can have backups for files, folders, or an entire drive. Macrium Reflect lets you create ISO images and burn them to CDs or USBs. The primary reason why Macrium Reflect is so popular is that it's the best software today for cloning drives. You can clone one or all available drives in your disk to another disk. Even if the second disk is smaller in size than the first, Macrium Reflect lets you reallocate the free space to ensure all your data is cloned. Overall, Macrium Reflect is an excellent addition to any computer as it's available for both homes and businesses with features catering to both, and it's a reliable way to secure a copy of your essential files. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I don't dislike anything about Macrium Reflect, but it lacks information on the working and the significance of the Rescue Media. But that's not an issue because plenty of YouTube videos explain how it works. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Quickly set up and use the imaging software and data capture (folders/files) from a drive. Very in-depth functions that I have just scratched the surface of. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It can be complex if you do not have time to complete the training. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Love the multisite manager. From one, easy to understand interface, we can see the status of all our clients backups. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I genuinely can't think of anything to dislike about reflect. It works, every time. Backups are so straight forward and we have total confidence in our restores. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Automatic scheduling of tasks, ability to run off a vbscript Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

How easy image guardian can be turned on and off and how it isn't password protected. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Overall an excellent software backup software that can be used to easily create entire hard disk image partition backups or clone disks.

Macrium Reflect is pretty robust software package, easy to use and offer many options to backup, encrypt, verify images

The Macrium team also keeps the software up to date with many minor incremental releases.

The progress bar is also fairly accurate and updated in real-time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Many options are available. The UI can sometimes be a bit busy, but that's the only minor complaint I have. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the operation speed, the simple and clear interface, the possibility to mount mrimg images as read only or read-write disks and overall the option to bypass read errors on source drive. I Also like a lot the iso rescue image that allows me to copy/restore disk and images also in virtual machine environment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There Is Nothing I really dislike in this software, eccept the Missing possibility of image only the used disk space in linux partitions (you can do it with ntfs) .If I could have a linux version ... Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My favorite component to Macrium was the Live CD environment cloning process. We used to rely on Clonezilla, but with modern SSD tech, it became a bit cumbersome. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I initially did not like that differential backups were locked to the paid version of Reflect. I was able to talk my manager into upgrading to the paid version and the entire team is thankful we did. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Macrium walks you through the cloning process step by step to ensure a perfect drive clone. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So far, I have not found a feature that I dislike about it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.