GFYI [Official] Macrium Reflect Home Edition Christmas 2020 Giveaway

[jasonX]

 

We at Geeks For Your Information are very pleased to announce our 
Macrium Reflect Home Edition Christmas 2020 Giveaway!

 

 

We would like to thank Macrium Software
for sponsoring the giveaway prizes.

 
 

Macrium Reflect is the complete "no-bloat" backup solution for personal use. Protect documents, data and operating systems using advanced disk imaging technology. It will backup your data/sensitive files into protective storage --encrypted and safe from corruption. In the event of computing disasters, (like partial or whole system failure) Macrium Reflect can recover from any backup image created and restore your data, partitions or even whole hard disks in a matter of minutes! 

Macrium Reflect also helps you upgrade your hard disk or try a new operating system with the knowledge that everything is securely saved and can be easily recovered. Taking full advantage of Microsoft Volume Shadow Service data is managed efficiently and can be automatically streamed to a secure storage even when your drives are active and in-use. 
 

Welcome to Macrium Reflect Home

With its improved "backup engine", Macrium Reflect version 7.3 is (to date) the fastest of all versions as compared to previous versions. The inclusion of 12 months of Essential Support with a standing home license gives all users the peace of mind knowing that he is covered at all fronts. So the user can just sit back, relax and be confident that Macrium Reflect will take care of everything and that's not all of it. If the user encounters any issues while using Macrium Reflect (or just want to ask some questions), Macrium support/technical staff is just chat or an email away! They will respond to you and all support tickets are replied to and solved in the shortest time there is as compared to other developers who drag their feet at the instance/presence of tickets. With Macrium support you are assured that all problems and issues will be solved! Includes Macrium viBoot for instant Hyper-V virtualization and Macrium Image Guardian. 

 

Macrium Reflect can backup whole partitions or individual files/folders into a single compressed, mountable archive file. This archive file is used to restore an exact image of the partitions on your hard disk so that you can easily upgrade it or recover your full system in any eventuality. It supports VBScript and MS-DOS batch files, along with scheduled tasks, among others. The Macrium Reflect interfaced is designed intuitively with the user in mind. It is designed and organized with simple follow wizards guiding the user through tasks. 

Features at a glance:
 

• Macrium Super-Fast Imaging
  
• File and folder backup
  
• Rapid Delta Cloning increases cloning speed by copying file system deltas
  
• Backup file Consolidation with Synthetic Full backup support
  
• SSD trim support
  
• Pre-defined backup plan templates
  
• Mount images in Windows Explorer for easy item level recovery 
  
• Rapid Delta Restore recovers your images in minutes or even seconds
  
• Restore images to dissimilar hardware using Macrium ReDeploy (Not included in the 30-Day Trial)
  
• Protect your backups from ransomware with Macrium Image Guardian
  
• Backup files and folders to a single compressed archive file.
  
• Recover partitions and entire disk images with just a few clicks of your mouse.
  

 

Disk Imaging
Macrium Reflect creates an accurate and reliable Image of a hard disk or the partitions on the disk. In the event of a partial or complete system loss, you can use this image to restore the entire disk, one or more partitions, or even individual files and folders. During the imaging process, Macrium Reflect copies the contents of entire volumes including a reference to their physical location on the storage device to an image file (.mrimg). User can store the image file on local or network drives, or removable drives connected using USB or eSATA and assign the storage to be protected by Macrium Image Guardian. 
 

More info about "Creating a backup image of your computer, drive or partitions" HERE

 

 

Configuring a Backup with Macrium Reflect

Differential and Incremental Images
Macrium Reflect can create Full, Differential, and Incremental images to optimize backup speed and disk space Full Differential Incremental requirements. When you image a volume for the first time, it is referred to as a image. A   image file Full contains the data Full stored in the volume. Macrium Reflect provides two alternative methods of all backing up your data after the initial full image has been completed:
 

• A Differential image that backs up all the data that has changed on the volumes since the last Full Image Differential was taken.
  
  
  
• An Incremental image that backs up all the data that has changed on the volumes since the   last image taken whether that is a Full, an Incremental or a Differential image. 
  

 

How to create Incremental and Differential Backups using Macrium Reflect

File and Folder Backups
To create a backup, select the files and folders you want to backup, apply File and Folder filtering   File and Folder criteria to include and exclude files and/or folders, and Macrium Reflect creates a compressed backup file (.mrbak) that can be restored directly or browsed using Windows Explorer. Storing backups in a single file is beneficial because it can be compressed, encrypted and stored elsewhere with ease. As you can for images, you can also create, and   file and folder backups to optimize backup Differential Incremental speed and disk space requirements. File and folder backups are ideal if you only wish to backup specific documents, photos or music, rather than your whole system.

 

 

File and Folder Backup using Macrium Reflect

Disk Cloning
Macrium Reflect, you can clone your system disks to enable you to swap failed disks out of your system and get things back up and running again in minutes. Cloning is often confused with imaging. The process is identical but instead of storing data to a file, it replicates volume contents and disk structures to an alternative device. When the cloning process is complete, the target disk is identical to the original and contains a duplicate of all volumes, files, operating systems and applications.

Cloning a disk is particularly useful to upgrade an existing hard disk and in the event of a hard drive failure, you can simply replace the failed disk with a clone and have your system up and running again in minutes. However, cloning a disk is not an efficient way of backing up your data if it changes frequently because the clone will only contain one point in time as there is no 'Backup Chain' history that is available with disk images. Also, "disk images" can be compressed and saved to any location. A confirmation check box (confirm/deny) was added since v7.2.4473 to aid users unfamiliar with "Restore/Clone" operation. 
 

More info about 'Cloning a disk" HERE

 

Cloning a disk using Macrium Reflect 7

Restoring Images
Macrium Reflect restores disks or their partitions exactly as they were when the backup was taken. The restore process also enables you to expand or shrink partitions if the restore target is a new disk and a different size to the original. If your whole system becomes corrupt, you can load Macrium Reflect and restore your image despite being unable to boot Windows. You can boot from the Macrium Reflect Windows PE rescue media and use Macrium Reflect to find and restore your images.
 

Restoring files and folders
Macrium Reflect restores selected files and their folder structures from File and Folder backup .mrbak files. There are a number of ways to restore backups:
 

• You can restore individual files, for example, accidentally deleted spreadsheets or lost photos by browsing an Image or File and Folder Backup. This process mounts the image file in Windows Explorer as if it were an extra disk drive. After it is mounted, you can browse and open files and copy the files back onto your active file system whenever you like.
  
  
  
• You can directly restore the contents of a file and folder backup using the Macrium Reflect file and folder restore feature.
  

 

More info about "Restoring a System Image with Macrium Reflect" HERE

 

 

Restoring a System Image with Macrium Reflect

Macrium Rescue Media
If in the event that your system or Windows OS is unbootable or if you lose it, you can start the PC using the Macrium Reflect rescue media on CD, DVD, or USB stick. The rescue media contains a bootable, lightweight version of Windows and a full version of Macrium Reflect. This lightweight version of Windows is called Windows Pre-installation Environment (also known as Windows PE or WinPE) and is provided by Microsoft. Macrium Reflect downloads the WinPE automatically for you and writes it to the rescue media. It will download just the components you will need to create your rescue media thus rescue your system. Note: From v7.2.4433, the driver folders for the WinPE/WinRE have been expanded to support multiple architecture and WIM versions.


 

Macrium ReDeploy
From the rescue environment you can launch Macrium to adapt the recovered Windows system to its new ReDeploy environment whether that is a virtual machine or a different computer. With Macrium Reflect, you can ReDeploy restore an image to a replacement computer or even create virtual hard drives to virtualize the machine, a technique sometimes called Physical to Virtual or P2V. Macrium ReDeploy is now included in all editions of Macrium Reflect except for the Free Edition. 



VBScript, PowerShell and MS-DOS batch file support
Macrium Reflect stores backup definitions as XML files that are loaded using the Reflect command line. This enables powerful batch and scheduling processing using VBScript, PowerShell or MS DOS batch files. Macrium Reflect includes a VBScript and PowerShell generator that creates template script files for programmable control over your backup cycles and Pre/Post backup events.

 

Macrium Reflect - Rapid Delta Restore Animated Demo

Macrium Rapid Delta Restore (RDR)
The concept of RDR has been something that has been thought about for quite some time here at Macrium Software. We were aware of competing technologies that offer fast restore capabilities but wanted to build something better. 

Where Macrium RDR differs is that it isn't dependent on VSS and a delta restore can be perform to   any disk that has a previous copy of the imaged file system, no matter what its current state. This means that you can restore quickly back to the original disk (similar to the Open Snapshot) method, and have the flexibility to restore to a different disk that contains the same file system on it in any state.
 

• Known state restore
  
  This method performs a restore of an incremental image to a file system at a. The problem with this known state method is that the 'know state' must be prepared beforehand and the target disk cannot be accessed before the final 'rapid' restore. This means that the target disk for the restore cannot be the original 'live' disk and a previous restore of the same backup set must have been performed beforehand and the disk taken offline. Not very flexible.
  
  
• Snapshot restore
  
  Another method is to rely on an open Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS) snapshot and use this to restore back to the state when the snapshot was created. Very quick, but only allows restoration back to the same disk and the image must have been created with VSS. Again, not flexible enough for real world.  
  

Macrium Rapid Delta Clone (RDC)
As with Rapid Delta Restore (RDR) the concept of RDR has been something that has been thought about for quite some time here at Macrium Software. We wanted to build a clone solution that would effectively and rapidly copy only the differences between the source and target file systems. The advantage of this is obvious, RDC offers similar a performance increase as an Incremental disk image offers over a Full image and enables regular clones to be a viable and fast DR solution.



Changed Block Tracking (CBT)
Macrium Reflect Changed Blocked Tracker (MRCBT) reduces the amount of time it takes to perform incremental and differential images by monitoring the changes to an NTFS formatted volume in real-time. This is especially relevant when a file system contains very large files, such as virtual hard disk (VHD) files, where speed improvements are significant and can reduce the incremental image time from hours to minutes or even seconds. See HERE for Change Block Tracker (CBT) changelogs. 

 

More info about Changed Block Tracking HERE

Macrium viBoot
Enables you to instantly create, start and manage Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines using one or more Macrium Reflect image files as the basis of the virtual machine storage sub-system. Macrium Reflect 7.1 also includes an updated version of viBoot.  viBoot provides instant virtualization of Macrium disk images to create a running Virtual Machine in a few seconds. This update to viBoot allows future support for other hypervisors such as VMware.  
 

More info about Macrium viBoot HERE

 

Macrium viBoot Demonstration

Macrium Image Guardian (MIG)
The new Macrium Image Guardian (MIG) feature will prevent unauthorized modifying of Macrium Reflect backup files on local and USB attached volumes. MIG provides assurance to every Macrium Reflect 7.1 user that their latest backups are recoverable, even after the worst-case scenario of a ransomware attack. MIG is focused on the single task of protecting Macrium Reflect backup files, so has a small footprint and is very easy to administer. MIG protects backup files on local NTFS volumes by blocking unauthorized write activity. MIG is network aware and allows other networked Macrium Reflect v7.1 clients to backup to shared MIG protected volumes. 
Macrium Image Guardian protects these file extensions below. 

 

 

More info about Macrium Image Guardian HERE

 

Latest stable version is Macrium Reflect v7.3.5365 (26-November-2020)

Bug fixes and Improvements v7.3.5365 - 26th November 2020
 

• Macrium Task Scheduler
  • Scheduling a backup to run as a specific user would sometimes prevent the Power Saving options from working correctly. This has been resolved.
    
  • Under certain circumstances, restarting Macrium Service would cause the Macrium Task Scheduler to stop running for around a minute. This has been resolved.
    
  • Schedule start dates can no longer be set later than the year 2999.
    
  •  
    
  
  
• File and Folder Backup
  Deleting a backed up folder and creating a file with the same name as the deleted folder mid backup set could cause a File and Folder backup set to fail to load. This has been resolved.
  
  
• Changed Block Tracker
  We've changed Windows event ID 13 - "IOCTL_MRCBT_QUERY_VOLUME_TRACKING_INFORMATION failed on device" to be Informational.
  
  
• Exchange backup
  • Exchange backup was not checking for missing DB files to ensure a DB was available for backup. This has been resolved.
    
  • Mixed case database filename extensions could cause databases to not be backed up. This has been resolved.
    
  
  
• Various
  Various minor fixes and changes to improve Macrium Reflect.
  

Bug fixes and Improvements v7.3.5321 - 3rd November 2020
 

• Macrium Task Scheduler
  • If a scheduled backup was missed without the option 'Run the task as soon as possible after a scheduled task is missed' enabled, then the Run Now button would stop working until the PC was restarted. This has been resolved.
    • Scheduled backups running on startup were starting too quickly, without giving network connections time to initialise. This has been resolved.
      • The Macrium Task Scheduler now keeps extra copies of its internal configuration files to prevent failure on corruption.
        • When trying to import a scheduled task with a definition file path that doesn't exist, Reflect will now prompt to Browse for a different definition file.
          
   
  • Rescue Media Builder
    
    The Windows Version of the WinRE kernel could be incorrectly displayed. This has been resolved.
     
    • Reflect Monitor
      
      ReflectMonitor.exe could fail to launch at logon and prevent notification of running backups. This has been resolved.
       
      • Backup Log
        
        A Consolidation 'Warning' error could override a 'Failure' error for a backup and incorrectly display a Warning icon instead of Error. This has been resolved.
         
        • License Key
          
          We've added 'copy' functionality for the license key displayed in the About dialog
          

GFYI Macrium Reflect Updates Thread HERE

MACRIUM REFLECT RELEASE NOTES HERE

 

Macrium Reflect Product Comparison HERE

 

PERTINENT LINKS

 

Macrium Reflect Home Page HERE

Download Macrium Reflect Home 30-day Trial HERE

Full version Download HERE

Macrium Reflect Support HERE

Macrium Reflect Blog_Techie Tuesday HERE

Macrium Reflect User Forum HERE

Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase HERE

Macrium Reflect Customer Support Portal HERE

 

Macrium Reflect Home Edition Licenses for this giveaway contest[/u]

 

Macrium Software has provided Geeks For Your Information Forum 
5 licenses of Macrium Reflect ver 7 Home Edition as Christmas 2020 prize. 
(12 months Essentials Support included)

 

CONTEST RULES

To boost forum participation/contribution, all who wish to participate MUST have posted in the Introduction thread AND created a minimum of one (1) authored-threads and five (5) posts (threads in sections: (i) Giveaways / Contests (ii) Deals and (iii) Geeks FYI > Feedback (iv) Introduction are NOT COUNTED as created authored-threads). Entries not meeting the requirement will be deleted. 

Members with on-going "warnings" will NOT be allowed to join any giveaways until such "warnings" have been lifted. WE WILL BE CHECKING!



1. Please answer the question below.  

"Share your personal experience with Macrium Reflect (free/paid versions) and what feature/s do you like best in the Macrium Reflect Home Edition?"


Post your reply as contest entry WITH your social media share.  Please see sample entry below.
 

 

2. REQUIRED: Please share this giveaway by pasting the quoted text below in your Facebook/Twitter/Google+ Account.  

(Share is NOT limited to popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Instagram.)
 

Geeks For Your Information Forum [Official] Macrium Reflect Home Edition Christmas 2020 Giveaway
https://www.geeks.fyi/showthread.php?tid=13685

 



Optional: You may want to like/follow Macrium Reflect's social networking sites as added support.
 

Macrium Reflect on Twitter

Macrium Reflect on Facebook

Macrium Reflect on YouTube

3. One entry per IP address ONLY. WE WILL BE CHECKING!

Only one entry per member is allowed. Dual entries will both be deleted and user will be banned from giveaway so please be careful.

If there are any questions / concerns pertaining to the giveaway/contest please get in touch with me through PM. Do not post it in this thread. Doing so will merit a warning and ultimately be banned from entering further giveaway/contests.




 

WINNERS WILL RECEIVE

 

Five (5) winners will each receive 1 license of Macrium Reflect Home version 7
(12 months Essentials Support included)

 

Winners will be selected by Macrium Reflect Representative

 

Upon winner announcement, all winners will only have 5 days to send a PM to claim their prize.

 

Please include your details (Name / Email) in your PM claim.

 

https://www.geeks.fyi/announcements.php?aid=1

 

https://www.geeks.fyi/showthread.php?tid=7717


ALL are INSTRUCTED to always  check out "Announcements" HERE and HERE

 

NO CONFIRMATION FOR THOSE WITH INSUFFICIENT/INCOMPLETE DETAILS.

 

Prize will be FORFEIT if a PM claim is not received within the specified timeframe.

 

Prize will be FORFEIT if a PM claim is "not confirmed".

 

NOTE TO ALL PARTICIPANTS

Macrium Reflect will provide a single-use "claim link" for each winner. 

Each link is "unique" to a winner and can only be used once.

The link will be an "order process" conducted by Macrium's online reseller cleverbridge AG.

To complete the claim, the winner will be required to complete the  "order process form" where he also needs to supply his "credit card" or "PayPal" details in the "Payment Options" portion. THIS IS REQUIRED.

WINNERS WILL NOT BE BILLED as this is $0.00 (100% discount). The required information is needed for the order processing to push through.


 

The Giveaway will run from 
December 10, 2020 to January 10, 2021

 

Good luck to all!!!