How to create a backup image using Macrium Reflect Free. Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. One
of the very common instructions I give people before doing something else,
something major, is to create an image backup of their machine.
If you've never done that and if you don't
know what it means, I want to show you one of the ways to do that.
As always, there are plenty of different
options, different tools and so forth, for making an image backup.
But I'm going to show you today using
the current version of Macrium Reflect Free Edition.
So this is something that you can
download, install and create a backup image right now for no money.
And I suggest you actually do that.
Let's walk through the process.
So we're over here on Windows Ten.
I'm firing up Edge.
What I'm going to search for is literally Macrium Reflect Free.
And in fact, there are several different.
You can see advertisers have popped up here in front.
What we're looking for is specifically Macrium Reflect and the free edition.
On the companion article for this video,
I will have a direct link to exactly what you want.
But if you're doing this yourself, this is what you're looking for.
Macrium Free Edition.
They will promote their trial of the current version.
That's kind of up to you.
It's not what I'm going to do today, but if you think that you might end up
purchasing the product eventually, the trial might be worth your effort.
In the case of this example, I don't want to go that way.
I want to go completely free. Now, even though it says commercial.
I experimented with this the other day.
You can actually do the download free commercial.
I'm going to do the backup at home.
Reflect Eight free Download free.
We're just going to go ahead and download that.
I need a personal license.
I am not going to register or download. And there it comes.
You can see it's downloading an Exe. That is actually reflects downloader program.
In other words, that was a very quick download.
Running this now will actually cause the software to be downloaded.
We're going to be downloading the free version.
We're going to put it in this folder.
We're going to run the installer right away.
We just go ahead and click on download.
At this point, we're done with the browser.
So I'm going to go ahead and close that as well and get that out of our way.
Of course, UAC. This installer does install things
at a very low level, requiring administrative access.
Clicking next to begin the process
of installing set up wizard license Agreement Of course.
Personal use.
I agree that this is being installed for personal, non commercial use.
We're not going to register this again. This one's up to you.
If you want to register it, by all means go ahead and give them.
They do not spam you.
They do send you some marketing stuff
and you can opt out at any time, but it's really not a problem.
I'm on their list so many times that there's no point in my adding myself.
Again, installing the desktop shortcut again, that's up to you.
Normally I don't because I like a clean
desktop, as you can see from the background here.
But it's all up to you.
These features are for the non free
version and instant VM booting of Macron backups.
We don't need that right now.
All we're trying to do is get a backup image of our machine.
So we'll just go ahead and click next and we'll hit Install.
Since we're done with the installation and we want to go directly into creating
a backup image, we'll go ahead and let it launch.
Now, if we weren't here,
if you wanted to come back to it later, you'll see that there is in fact
a shortcut on the desktop, and it has been added to the Start menu
and recently added as well as under M here for Macrium and Macrium Reflect.
So we'll go ahead and let this finish and start the program right away.
So what we're looking at here is the default interface for the backup
process in Macrium Reflect version eight.
There are two disks on this machine.
This top line MBR disc one,
it's telling me this is master boot record as opposed to a GPT type disk.
Again, irrelevant at this point,
but this is showing you the different partitions that are on the disk and it
will give us the option to back up the entire hard disk,
which is this checkbox over here or simply back up individual partitions.
I recommend when you take an image
of a hard disk when you're backing up for real, that you always back up
the entire hard disk unless you have a reason not to.
By backing up the entire hard disk, the thing you're really protecting
yourself from at that point is a hard disk failure.
If the disk itself self destructs and you lose everything
on it, that would imply you have lost all of the partitions on that disk.
Therefore, by having all the partitions
in your backup, you can simply restore to the replacement hard disk.
There are other scenarios where you might want to only backup, say the C partition.
But that's not what we're going to do here.
And in general, it's not what I recommend you do.
The other disk here, MBR disk two, that's my external drive.
That is my USB drive that I have connected to this machine.
And in fact, you can see it has a name notein XPS 15 backup because that's
the machine it used to work on and it has close to a terabyte of free space.
What we're going to do is image selected disks on this computer.
Now, yes, it looks like we've selected all of the disks,
but if we just click on Image the selected disks on this computer,
we will now get to make the choice of which disks to be backed up.
That means I want to Uncheck the external drive.
I'm leaving the internal drive,
the drive that has the C partition on it checked, and all of the partitions in it
checked so that we're backing up the entire physical hard drive.
The destination where do I want this to go?
This little folder over here lets you navigate.
It's not very obvious,
but if you click on that little folder icon, you'll get a pop up that then lets
you say, okay, let's expand this, let's go down and look at this backup
drive, and I'm just going to go ahead and place the backup image in the root
of this backup drive, which happens to be e in my case.
And that's actually all it does is it enters e colon backslash for me.
I could, if I wanted to create a folder, subfolder places to put things, whatever.
Again, that's always up to you,
but for just doing a single quick backup, an example of a backup,
I'm just going to write that to the root of the edrive, the backup file name.
I'm actually going to leave that alone,
because what it's going to do is give me an image ID, which will be unique for each
image, and then some numbers that might be used later if you end up doing things like
Incremental or differential images on top of this.
Again, our focus here is simply to create a single backup image of the entire
machine, and that's a fine setting to leave alone.
Now, in Advanced Options, you don't have to touch this, however,
I generally do, and what I generally do, because machines are faster than they used
to be, is I go ahead and hit high compression.
That means it's going to spend a little bit more time in the processor,
compressing the data that it's putting out on the image file.
The image file itself will be a little bit smaller.
That means I can keep more images.
I can keep other data on that external drive.
I could do whatever I want.
I see no reason not to have it default too
high unless you happen to have a particularly slow machine.
Everything else that's here.
Well, maybe Auto Verify is good to turn on as well.
What that will do is once the backup image
has been created, Reflect will go back and make sure that it
has what it thinks that the image was successful, that it actually compares
correctly to what was backed up in the first place.
Everything else here we really don't need
to do file size has more to do with if you're happening to back up to things like
DVDs or CDs, which honestly, nobody should be doing anymore.
You could put a password on the image if you want to.
I don't, but if this is one way to secure
the image from prying eyes, verify the file system.
Honestly, all this really does is run check disk before it does the backup.
There's really no need for the backup program to do that.
If you want to run a check disk yourself, by all means, go for it.
Backup Set file name prefix well, we see.
We've already got the image ID as part of the file name.
We can add comments to this backup if we
want to, so that the image itself can also include a little bit of additional
information about maybe why we created this backup, or any other important
information that you might want to keep with it and then shut down.
You can, in fact, let Reflect shut down the computer when it's done backing up.
In this case, like I said,
we're doing a single image, ideally in preparation for doing something
else to the machine, setting ourselves a safety net.
So we're not going to shut down, we're just going to let it run.
Well, click on next. Actually.
Now this allows you to define schedules for this back up.
We're not going to do that.
Scheduling is beyond the scope of what I want to do today.
Like I said, all I want to do is create an image backup.
So we're going to click next.
This is a summary of what's going to happen.
We don't really have to worry about the retention rules at this point.
These are the operations that it's going to be doing.
You can see there's a separate operation
for each partition on the drive we'll click on finish.
Now, there are two things that we may want to do here.
We can either run the backup now,
which is of course what we're going to do, but it also lets you save everything
that you've just defined as an XML backup definition file.
I'm not going to do that.
If I were setting up a backup to be automated, if I were going to now say this
is what I want to happen every night or once a week or once a month or whatever,
then yes, we would be saving it into an XML file.
But for our purposes here,
we're just wanting to create a backup as simple and as easy as we can.
Run this backup now click OK, and off it goes.
Now, as you can imagine, this is going to take a little while.
How long it will take for you will depend
on exactly how fast your machine is, how much data there needs to be backed up,
how fast the hard disk is, how fast the USB interface is.
If you're potentially running on an older
USB, two interface, all those kinds of things contribute.
What we're going to do here is let
the backup run and we will basically fast forward through everything
from now until just before the backup completes.
So enjoy.
And we're done.
It took 23 minutes for this machine to be backed up.
A good chunk of that was the verification
phase if you were watching closely on the progress but that's it.
We've got an image. Now to confirm that we
have in fact an image that we understand and expect.
I'm closing reflect here and I'm just
going to go ahead and open up Windows File Explorer this time.
What we're going to do is go take a look
at that backup drive and there you'll see this file, this backup image.
In fact I'm going to change one option here to make sure that we're looking
at extensions because Macrium backup image files are .mring.
This is the file that we just created
and you can see that it is roughly about 30GB in size which makes sense given
the amount of data that's stored on this machine.
But that's it.
That was creating an image.
Yes, there are other steps if you ever need to use this image creating rescue
media, restoring an image, restoring files from an image,
those kinds of steps but none of those are possible without this step.
And no matter what happens as long as you
have this file you can learn those other steps later.
So I hope this is helpful.
I hope this encourages you to create backup images before you do something
major to your system like upgrading the version of the operating system or
doing other major things that you're uncertain of.
By all means create an image.
It is just this simple and while it takes a little bit of time it takes a lot less
time than having to recover from some of the failures that you're protected from
if you don't have a backup. For comments for updates for related links and more,
visit Ask Leo.com/29797. I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.