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Backup & disaster recovery

Macrium Reflect

Disk imaging and partition backup on Windows, bare-metal recovery included.

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Reviewed by Giuseppe Tommaso Curella, Infrastructure & network engineer Updated 2026-11-05

Official site www.macrium.com

Independent reference — this page is a review. Macrium Reflect is downloaded from the vendor’s official site, not from here.

PlatformsWindows only (desktop + Server)
LicencePaid — proprietary subscription; free edition discontinued
PriceSubscription (annual / 3-year): Home / Workstation / Server
SectionBackup & disaster recovery
Updated2026-11-05

What it is

Disk images and partition-level backups on Windows are its bread and butter. It handles full, incremental and differential images, restore to dissimilar hardware via ReDeploy, and a bootable WinPE recovery environment.

Problems it closes

  • You want a dependable disk image before a risky change or a migration.
  • A dead system disk has to be restored fast onto new — maybe different — hardware.
  • Windows servers and workstations need scheduled image backups that actually restore.

How administrators run it

  • Schedule full and incremental images to a NAS or external disk.
  • Keep a WinPE rescue USB on hand to restore a machine that won’t boot.
  • Use ReDeploy to drop an image onto dissimilar hardware.
Macrium Reflect backup interface
Screenshot: TechRadar (editorial). Verify rights before commercial reuse.

Strengths & trade-offs

Strengths

  • Disk imaging is fast and reliable.
  • Bare-metal and dissimilar-hardware recovery are covered.
  • A bootable rescue environment comes in the box.

Trade-offs

  • Windows only.
  • The free edition is gone — it’s subscription now.

Common questions

Is there still a free version?

No. It’s subscription-based now; the old free edition has been retired.

Files, or whole disks?

It works at the image level (whole disks/partitions), but you can still pull individual files and folders out of an image.

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