I'm officially switching to Macrium Reflect. So long Acronis

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FlyingPenguin
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I'm officially switching to Macrium Reflect. So long Acronis

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I've been using the free version of Macrium for the past two years on my gaming PC, and the rescue USB occasionally to image other PCs that Acronis refused to boot on or would fail to recognize USB drives on.

My old workstation was running Acronis 2016 for weekly scheduled image backups, but when I put the new workstation together, I bought a 4 license pack of Macrium Reflect Home, mainly because the Redeploy feature, to clone a drive to new hardware, requires a license. The price was a reasonable $140. It's $70 for a single license, so I figured a 4 pack for twice the amount was a bargain considering that I need three licenses (eventually, I'll get around to installing it on my file server).

I upgraded the gaming PC to one of the new licenses, and installed it in the new workstation, and spent yesterday configuring the scheduled weekly image backup. It handles running pre/post scripts a bit differently than Acronis. Acronis just lets you run a batch file before and after a job, which I used to mount and unmount the backup drive that stores images (to prevent it from being visible to ransomware). In Macrium it's a bit different. Instead you can create a batch file (or vbScript PowerShell script, I'm just more comfortable with batch files) in Macrium itself, to run a scheduled job from Macrium's built in scheduler, and then you can edit the batch file to insert your own code. It was pretty simple to cut and paste my mount/unmount commands into the script.

While it has it's peculiarities, I really like Macrium. It has a much better GUI than Acronis' stupid dumbed down interface, and it's very fast and reliable. Unlike Acronis, it doesn't keep nagging you to log into a cloud account.

The free version does everything you would ever need. The licensed version adds encryption, the different hardware Redeploy tool, incremental backups (I never do incrementals), individual file backups in addition to imaging, and their Image Guardian ransomware protection which I never install (it's a background service that restricts write access to certain files).
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

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Executioner
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Re: I'm officially switching to Macrium Reflect. So long Acronis

Post by Executioner »

Yeah I just used it to clone a HD to a SSD on a laptop. I had to drag the partitions and resize them to make them fit on the drive. Macrium makes that easy during the clone. I've been tempted just to buy a license since I use it quite often with never any issues. I also like the fact that they don't change the interface. It's always the same. The only updates are for fixing bugs etc.
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FlyingPenguin
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Re: I'm officially switching to Macrium Reflect. So long Acronis

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Slight changes in version 8 if you buy the license (free version is 7). Nothing major, but they don't call the main tabs "Backup" and "Restore" anymore. Now it's "Create Backup" and "Existing Backups". A minor dumb down concession. Threw me off at first. Just minor wording like that.

Version 8 supports Dark Mode too. Sweet. I've been using Dark Mode in Windows for a few months and it's nice when an app is updated to support it.
"Turns out I’m 'woke.' All along, I thought I was just compassionate, kind, and good at history. "

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Losbot
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Re: I'm officially switching to Macrium Reflect. So long Acronis

Post by Losbot »

I switched to Macrium about 2 years ago. No issues. Backups run on schedule.
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