Macrium Reflect free is going away.
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. I got a series of questions in recent days
that all boiled down to, well, I'll just pick this one.
If I understand correctly, the free version of Macrium Reflect will
no longer be maintained with regular updates.
If that is the case,
do you have any advice on whether to stay with Macrium or switch to something else?
And of course, if so, which product?
It's frustratingly ironic to me because,
of course, I started creating a course on how to use Macrium Reflect.
And within like two or three weeks of my having begun that course,
begun the creation of that course, and in fact, using the free edition
of Reflect for at least one of the lessons they're in, they made this announcement
and in fact, the announcement is exactly what the questioner was asking about.
Macrium has announced that the free
edition, whatever it is today, is all that it will ever be.
And they're not going to make any feature updates or bug fixes.
They will do some security fixes until the end of 2023, and after that, that's it.
Nothing.
So the question, of course, is, well, great, what do we all do,
those of us who have been using Macrium Reflect Free for various reasons?
What are the options next?
And of course, yes, I have recommendations.
Of course I do.
My strongest recommendation,
quite honestly, upgrade, purchase the paid edition of Macrium Reflect.
That's what I've done myself.
I actually ended up getting a four pack
of the family edition because I've got enough computers to make that worthwhile.
And the discount kicks in quite nicely when you've got that many.
The neat thing about the paid edition,
of course, is that you get all of the features.
You get image backups, differential backups, incremental backups,
scheduling, the whole nine yards, everything that's in the product.
The free edition, of course, was restricted, I think.
It didn't do incremental backups and only did differentials.
But the big feature for me,
the selling point for the paid edition of Macrium Reflect, regardless of whether
they discontinue the free edition, is their Image Guardian feature.
That's a feature that protects your
backups, the image backups that you've created from Tampering.
Put another way, one of the biggest questions I get
whenever I talk about backups as being a way to keep safe from ransomware is,
of course, well, wouldn't ransomware encrypt my backups?
Wouldn't they also hold my backups for ransom?
There's articles on that.
I've talked about it a lot.
But what's neat about this feature is ransomware.
Can't you can't
when you've got Image Guardian turned on, the images that are created
by Macrium Reflect are in fact accessible only to Macrium Reflect.
They use Windows file protection,
windows security, to lock down access to those files so
that even you or I can't go in and delete or do something with those images.
To me, that's an incredibly valuable
feature, but regardless, the paid edition is my strongest recommendation.
If of course, it's in your budget.
I get that it may not be reflect is not
the cheapest backup option out there, but it is, in my opinion,
the most professional and one of the most reliable solutions that I can think of.
Now, the second option is probably not so
obvious, but it's very much like folks who've been using Windows Seven or even
Windows XP for the last five or ten years, and that is keep using Free.
Seriously, just keep using it.
It's not going to stop working.
It's just not going to get feature updates
and it's not going to get security updates.
Now, I suspect that the impact of not
getting security updates will be very, very small.
Let's face it, Reflect isn't that huge a target.
The kinds of things that might impact it are very small.
I'm not considering that to be the biggest risk.
If you go down this path, honestly, the bigger risk is that Macrium has
stated that the current addition of Windows,
Windows Ten and Windows Eleven, that's as far as they're going to go.
The 2H 22, right?
The second half of 2022 editions
of Windows Ten and Windows Eleven are the last formally supported ones.
If they happen to work on future versions,
which they probably will, at least for a while, great, they'll keep working.
My concern is that eventually something in Windows will change that will impact
Reflect in some way, and the free edition will not be updated
to account for that, only the paid edition will.
But until that happens, and that could be months, years from now,
until that happens, the free edition will just keep working.
And I'm happy to say, yeah, keep using it.
The third option, of course, is to jump ship and choose a different tool.
I've been recommending two backup programs for several years right now,
in addition to Macrium Reflect, I've also been recommending EaseUS Todo.
Todo actually does have a free version.
They continue to have a free version.
I believe that their free version doesn't
do scheduling, if I'm not mistaken, but they'll do incremental backups
regardless, especially for those one off backups that you want to take.
If you're just wanting to grab a full
image of a system manually, that's a fine solution as well.
So the bottom line here is that you have lots of options.
You really do the paid version, keep using the free version,
or jumping ship to another tool like EaseusTodo or any of several others.
The most important thing about this entire scenario is that you keep backing up.
I cannot stress how important that is enough.
Regardless of where you're at,
what tool you're using, whether it be the free version of Reflect
or something else, do keep backing up and make sure then
to switch to a tool that you will continue to use and use regularly to make sure
you're keeping everything on your machine as safe as is possible.
I will throw in a little plug here at the end, I do have a course saved
backing up with Macrium Reflect, version eight.
It's an online course.
It's the course I mentioned at the beginning.
It's available now,
and it will walk you through setting up, backing up, configuring, restoring,
testing and a bunch of other things, all with respect to Macrium Reflect.
Yep, it does use the free version for one
of its examples, but almost everything else in that course is all about the paid
version and basically my strongest recommendation for backing up these days.
So if you're at all interested in learning more about Macrium Reflect and how to use
it and really use it well, I'm going to recommend you check out that course.
Hopefully, this is helpful.
For comments, for updates,
for related links and more, visit askleo.com/152585.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
And this is AskLeo.com. Thanks for watching.