

We’ve been using it for seemingly forever, and it’s never let us down yet. If all you want to do is image your system or data, then Macrium Reflect Free 6 is a great way to do it. It lacks some features of the full versions, such as incremental backup (though it.

And much better than the six invoked by Acronis True Image. An unsupported free edition is available for home and commercial use. On the bright side, the free version of Reflect spawns only a single background process, down from the three that the pay versions create. Backup generally takes place during off hours or in the background, so we don’t lend performance a lot of weight in our evaluations. That’s about two minutes slower than any of the competition, though CPU usage was minimal. That might be nice, as Reflect Free 6 took just over nine minutes to perform our 115GB system backup. Macrium claims increased performance for the latest version 7, of which a free version is promised soon. PE allows driver injection (adding them at restore time), so you’re likely okay there anyway.

It can also clone drives in addition to making images of partitions. Macrium is easy to understand, even for someone who hasnt used backup software before. It also lets you choose the drivers you want to install. Macrium Reflect is one of the best partition backup applications available in the market. Reflect Free supports both MBR and GPT disks (it was late to the GPT game), and it has a great boot media creator, which lets you change flavors of Windows PE to best suit the operating system being backed up. Several flavors of the Windows PE boot environment are supported by Reflect Free 6
