Macrium Reflect Free 5 has just been released. The free backup software only supports disk based backups, which means that you won’t be able to backup individual folders and files. The new version of the drive imaging tool features several improvements over previous versions. Users who have worked with previous versions will notice the new user interface.

The backup software displays all connected hard drives in a list that displays their names, drive letters, used disk space and total disk space. The options and actions feel like they have been sprinkled by the developers all over the place.

An Actions link is displayed underneath the currently selected partition in the interface. A click opens a context menu with options to image the selected partition or analyze the partition’s file system.

Then there are the Clone this disk and Image this disk links underneath the main hard drive. These do not appear underneath secondary hard drives. The purpose of those links and of the check boxes in the interface are not really clear. It feels a bit strange that unselected drives are still displayed under the all-drives backup option (even though they will be excluded from the backup).

Windows users basically have the following options:

• Backup one or multiple partitions.
• Create an image of the Windows partitions
• Clone the main Windows partition. Requires another hard drive connected to the computer.

The task that new users should start with is to create a recovery disk . Available options are a Linux based recovery media or recovery media based on Windows PE 3.1. Once done you can run backup tasks to create the backup images or clone the main partition. Backup locations include a folder on a hard drive, a CD or DVD burner and media, and even a list of alternate backup locations which will be tried in sequence until a suitable location is found to store the backups.

The software unfortunately does not support saving backups to remote locations. You can access advanced options during backup configuration to configure features such as compression, maximum file sizes or comments. There is no option to password protect backups.

Macrium Reflect Free supports scheduling of backups, but the creation is somewhat complicated. You cannot schedule backups right away, but need to create a job first, save it as a backup definition file and configure the scheduled backup once that file has been created.

Many tasks that users expect from a backup software are missing and only available in the commercial versions of the program. This includes incremental and differential backups, the ability to backup selected files and folders, remote backup location support or the aforementioned password protection and encryption.

Macrium Reflect Free is available for Windows based systems. It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The free version does not support Windows Server editions.

The developers need to work on the program layout and functionality if they want to compete with other free backup solutions.

A better program in many regards is Easeus Todo Backup which we reviewed two weeks ago. It comes with all the features that Macrium Reflect Free offers plus other features like the ability to backup individual files or folders.

Macrium Reflect is a fast Disk Imaging and File Backup Solution that is compatible to Windows XP 32/64 bit and Windows Vista 32/64 bit. I suggest you head over to my review to find out more about the software. All of the features of the free version are of course included in this one as well.

The commercial version of Macrium Reflect adds a few – very interesting – features. It adds:

• Windows Server 2003 compatibility
• File and Folder backup and restore
• Differential disk images and backups
• Incremental disk images and backups
• VBScript Generator
• Email notifications
• Run programs before or after backup
• Shut down PC after backup
• Windows system event log support
• Windows PE 2.0 Rescue CD with RAID support
• Windows boot menu

The incremental backups will definitely come in handy.

Macrium Reflect is a disk imaging software for Windows XP, Windows Server and Windows Vista that’s available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. It can backup partitions or full hard disks even when Windows is running which is definitely a nice to have feature. The backups can be stored on another hard drive, network drive or optical drive which is probably not the best choice if the size of the data is bigger than ten Gigabytes.

The backup can be compressed to save space which will in turn increase the time it takes to create the backup. The user has the choice between no, medium or high compression with medium being the default value. Two additional options are noteworthy: The option to choose between an intelligent sector copy which will not copy the Windows Pagefile and Hibernation file or an exact copy of the selected hard disk or partition.

The second option is to set a maximum file size which can be set to automatic or user defined. The automatic file size will use the file system of the partition to determine the size. The full edition has a few features that the free does not have, especially incremental backups are worth to be mentioned.

It’s also worth to note that the computer has to be restarted before the first backup can be started. I tried it without restarting and received an error message but it worked fine after the first restart. A backup of my Windows partition with 38 Gigabyte of data did not take longer than 18 minutes to create which is definitely fast, not sure if it’s the fastest software though. The size on the hard disk was 29.4 Gigabytes.

Another important step is the creation of a rescue disk to be able to recover the backups when it’s necessary to do that. The last feature that deserves to be mentioned is the option to browse the images in Windows Explorer as if they were normal partitions. Great if you want to pick a file or folder from the image.