Keeping clients' computers safe and profitable for over 40 years

Buy Macrium Reflect X if you haven't already

Preview: Macrium Reflect has protected my clients and my drives for nearly 20 years, but old free versions fail on some newer Windows restores. Buying a subscription is now worthwhile.

I've been using, buying, and recommending Macrium Reflect for nearly 20 years. My billing history with them starts in 2009. During that time, they've had many different pricing models. For a while they offered version 8 free for both commercial and non-commercial use as long as there were fewer than 10 installs per organization. Naturally, I installed it on all my client computers.

What does Macrium Reflect do, and why do you need it?

The primary purpose

Macrium Reflect is the premiere imaging program. The main purpose is to make an image of an entire drive. When a drive dies, or gets corrupted, we can simply restore an image, and everything is like it was when the image was made. If it is a new drive, it will be just like the old drive, with all the programs and documents.

My normal setup is to have it make a complete image on the first Monday of every month, and then make a differential image every week.

The secondary purpose

Macrium Reflect can also make data backups. I have it making a complete data-only backup every month and then differential backups every day. I have it keep 10 previous copies of the daily backups and 3 of the full backups.

How do you restore?

If you need to restore an entire drive, you restore it from the image, and it overwrites everything. If you just want a file from the backup (or a folder), you can mount your backup as a virtual drive and then have File Explorer find and copy any file.

The Problem

I've been letting my clients continue to use the old program since Macrium is now requiring annual subscriptions for everyone, even for personal use. But that old program is out of date. I recently ran into two attempts to restore some files onto a newer computer, and it couldn't run. Windows has improved security, and the years-old program no longer works with newer Windows installations. Fortunately, the new program was compatible with the old images, so we could recover the files.

The Solution

Buy a subscription. Go to https://www.macrium.com/ and purchase a subscription to Macrium. If you are non-commercial, you can buy the less expensive home product; otherwise, you'll need to buy the business version. It is more expensive than I prefer, but I've been unable to find anything I'd use instead.