Macrium Reflect

Macrium Reflect Free Edition is the best free disk-image-application for 32+64 bit Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7, but it cannot clean up old backup-images automatically, as the Standard-, PRO- and Server-Editions of Macrium Reflect or the commercial products Acronis True Image or Norton Ghost do. For the automatical cleaning up of old backup files with Macrium Reflect Free Edition to prevent the hard disk from being overfilled, I use this method:

Keep only a maximum of X full backups with Macrium Relect Free Eddition and a bat-file

My personal solution for this cleanup-task is a batch-file Del.Older.than.P2-Files.bat for the cleanup. With this method you give the new backup in the folder "Drive:....\Backup-Folder"

To cleanup you must call the files e.g. with System Scheduler:

Del.Older.than.P2-Files.bat Q:\Backup.C 6

Text inside the bat-file:

REM @echo off REM deletes the the oldest files in %1, except the youngest %2 files

if %1!==! goto end if %2!==! goto end

setlocal set folder=%1 REM pause set KeepFiles=%2 REM pause for /f "skip=%KeepFiles% delims=" %%i in ('dir /b /a-d /o-d %folder%') do del %folder%%%i /F REM pause dir %folder% /OD pause :end

[Edited by em4020, May 09]

It is possible to run (also the free version) reflect.exe from the command line or a VB script. So it is easy to schedule new backups and to clean up old backup-images e.g. with Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler. A number of command line arguments allow the user flexibility to perform a number of actions. There are three main usage areas as follows:

For running a backup use the syntax as follows:

reflect.exe [-v | -e [-w] [-full | -inc | -diff] [xml filename] ]

Example to run a full backup using an XML file: reflect.exe -e "c:\backup.xml"

Not reliable backing up to my home cloud drive. Works sometimes, and not others. No notifications on failure (you'll find out the hard way), and the logs are useless; just saying "cannot write" - which I assume means it just gives up without even re-trying. I have no peace of mind with this thing, so uninstalled.

For me Macrium Reflect Free is the best image program for Windows and LINUX. YES - Linux too, even it is not a Linux program.

I‘m using Macrium Reflect Free for Windows for many years now.

Meanwhile I switched to MX Linux and I’m using a dual system with WIN10 and MX Linux.

On my SSD there are now several partions with FAT32, NTFS- and (Linux-) ext4-file systems.

With Macrium Reflect Free I can backup/clone the complete SSD or single partitions within WIN10 or by using the Macrium Reflect - rescue-USB-drive, if I don’twant to use WIN10.

All tasks (clone/backup/restore) are executed without any failure.

I tested some other Image programs, but Macrium Reflect Free is the fastest and most convenient.

Many thanks to the developers for this great and free of charge program!

This is currently the best (and free) software to clone your whole Windows OS to new disk.

A year ago I used "Acronis True Image for Crucial" (free version if you have Crucial disk) but now I also bough the new disk (also Crucial) but this software couldn't handle cloning OS with two partitions to bigger disk and just extending one (C drive).

In Macrium Reflect Free it was super easy to do. It also warned me that it will copy my partitions without encryption but it was fine for me. Everything works after I put new disk to my PC.

There are a lot of youtube videos how to clone you OS to bigger drive in this software, but it's very intuitive anyway, so you can just try it by yourself

This piece of software has saved me a lot of time and effort when it comes to recovery

It couldn't clone to the same physical disk.