Macrium Reflect

Is anybody using it? I've downloaded the trial and it seems VERY nice backup software. The $40 price tag is pretty good too, considering it compares quite well with Acronis TrueImage. Has anyone had any issues with it?

 

I've used Macrium Reflect's free edition for some time now. It works magnificently, and has a nice interface and lots of features. It's a steal to get good backup software like this for $40.

 

Used the free version for a bit and then bought the paid one about 6 months ago - Program works well, menus are intuitive and simple to navigate - pleased with the purchase.

 

I just tried the free version and it seems pretty good and $40 is a fair price. Reviews I found were in general quite positive.

 

Ditto here about the free version. I've been using it for ages and I've never had an issue with it.

The only caveat I've noticed is that if you're backing up an image that you'd like to put on a different computer/hard drive, you'll want to make sure that the partition you're making an image of is smaller than that of the drive it will eventually be on. The reason for this is that Macrium will allow you to expand a smaller image to take up a larger amount of space, but it won't allow you to shrink one down (even if what you'd be losing was free space to begin with). You may even experience this issue with two HDDs of the same size.

For example: I had a laptop with a 40GB drive that was dying, so I made an image of it and popped in a new 40GB drive. The new one was detected as being just .01GB smaller than the old one, so Macrium refused to put the image on the new drive. I had to go back and shrink my original partition slightly.

It's a common sense problem/solution, but I had hoped that the software would be capable of dealing with such issues on the fly.

 

Hello boys and gurls

a question about this software, the size of the backups you create...are thei supposed to be this powerful, im trying to backup a folder on 67 Gb
(note this is not a OS disc we talk about) so im gonna backup video files

the output became on 67 Gb also...even though i setted it to use "high" compression, this was not what i hade expected, but what do i know..this is my first backup software
so let me ask this question...is this perhaps how people generally have it? all your backuped video files on 67 Gb lies on another of your hard drives and just take up the same space as the source hard drive?

cause who can burn this 67 Gb file to a single DVD-RW disc,
the only solution i can come up with otherwise is to own a portable USB hard hard drive that you will up with this kinds of large files? i have off course no such equipment!

 

Your videos are already in a compressed format, so the compression algorithm used by Macrium cannot squeeze them any tighter than they already are. And, no, you cannot use DVDs for backup purposes anymore these days...

 

Backing up to external USB hard drives is the way to go. Pretty reliable, portable and fairly cheap these days. I saw a 250GB for $40 on sale (USB powered). You can get 1 TB drives for $100 or less. Cheaper than DVD's in the long run.

As Pirx points out, your video files are already compressed, so not much further compression is possible.

The only way to reduce their size would be to re-encode them using, for example Xvid or Divx, and lowering the bit rate and tweaking to get best compression with least loss of quality. Of course, they may already be in the best format and re-encoding takes a lot of time and trouble, so not really recommending that, just mentioning it for your edification.

Good luck!