Macrium Reflect Standard Review

Full review

Setup

Macrium Reflect Standard takes a slightly different approach with its installation when compared to other software. We noticed that Macrium supports their downloads through CNET (download.com). Even when you click download on the official Macrium website, you will be sent to a page with a download button with the CNET logo right on it.

After downloading the file, you will soon discover that what you downloaded was not the actual setup file, but a download utility. After launching the utility, you must then choose your edition, architecture, and destination folder. After you finish choosing your options, you simply click download and wait. The download itself takes under one minute.

Once the download is complete, the installation will start. This is where you would enter your serial key from your purchase, or you can opt for a 30 day trial.

Imaging

Upon launching the program, you will be greeted to the “Create a Backup” screen. Macrium Reflect provides a full-arsenal of imaging capabilities. The software supports all types of backups. Full, differential, and incremental backup methods are all at your disposal. Backup images can be made for all drives and partitions on your system with just a few clicks. Users also have the option of imaging certain disks, or even specific files and folders. There are advanced settings that can be changed before each backup, which allows users to tweak settings like data compression levels or even set a password for the image file.

Disk-cloning is just as easy as imaging. Simply select the drive you wish to clone, and then choose its destination drive. Macrium Reflect makes the process fairly simple, so most users should be able to handle it effectively.

Restoring

Like imaging, retrieving drives and files with Macrium Reflect is made simple. After clicking on the restore tab, you will be greeted to a list of all the backup images on your system. An entire image can be restored with a few clicks. You also have the option to browse through individual files within an image and pluck it out for restoration.

Effectiveness

Macrium Reflect is an overall efficient piece of software. We suffered zero hiccups in our tests, and both backup and restore functions performed swiftly. Every single feature performs as advertised. You can count on Macrium Reflect to be a stable, error-free addition to your system.

Features

Automatic updates – Macrium Reflect automatically updates itself without any effort from the user. Don’t worry about clicking through menus or the product website for the newest updates. Macrium has you covered.

Create recovery media – Users have the ability to create a rescue CD to act a safety net.

Scripting – For more sophisticated backups, users can take advantage of the VBSScript language to fit their needs.

Scheduling – Set future dates for the software to perform a backup of your drives or files.

Ease of use

At first glance, Macrium Reflect’s interface looks confusing because of a high number of menus and tabs. The average user will have no knowledge of these options and won’t know where to start. But after a few minutes of playing around and reading some detailed explanations from within each feature’s menu, almost all users will have a grasp of the program.

Help & support

Macrium doesn’t offer any luxurious support options. The only way to get in contact with an actual person for support is through email. They have their customers submit a ticket through their website and then reply via email. Other support options include a community forum, where users can post their problems and have other users help. The Macrium team also may reply to user posts in this forum. Other options include a help page with basic information and a database where you can search specific keywords for help. Overall the support isn’t bad, but it could be much better.

Overall

If you’re looking for a top-notch disk-imaging program, look no further than Macrium Reflect Standard. It has all the features you could ever want and performs far above expectations in terms of speed and reliability. It’s a slightly bit more expensive than many similar products, but in this case, you definitely get what you pay for.