Macrium Reflect

I used it to live-clone my old 512GB system drive (containing a Windows 10 Pro installation) to a new 500GB NVMe ssd. Other utilities refused to clone since the capacity of the target drive is smaller, but Macrium Reflect didn't complain, it just skipped the unused space and resized the partition on the fly.

But the best part as far as I'm concerned was what it did at the end of the cloning process, where it changed the disk id of the clone (so it won't collide with the old drive in Windows) and also automatically made the necessary changes to the BCD. I'm used to doing this manually, so it was really nice having it done automatically for me.

All that was left to do was to shut down Windows, disconnect the old drive and boot on the new drive. Zero problems, worked 100% perfectly.

There's a downside though, as I see it: a seemingly permanently running Windows service and an updater utility (which starts on every login) is also installed. I don't fancy that, since for me it's a very-seldom-use application, so I uninstalled Macrium Reflect completely when I was done cloning.

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"

Don't get me wrong, it is a good free product. BUT they need to include at the VERY LEAST the ability to do DIFFERENTIAL backups (like Paragon). The FREE version by forcing or sticking with ONLY a full backup EVERY time is to say the least BAD.
That is why I don't recommend this product to my friends or people NEW to doing image backups.
I usually recommend AOMEI BACKUPPER.
Why? Because it is FREE and not just a trial or anything, AND it ALLOWS ALL THE FOLLOWING:

1. Full Backup
2. Differential Backup
3. Incremental Backup
   So, WHY use anything else?

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.