TechRadar has reviewed Macrium Reflect 8 — and reckons the latest version of this popular disk backup and cloning program remains as powerful as ever, with the addition of several advanced features that are “great to see”.
Richard Gall, content and communications manager at Macrium, looks at the benefits from the vendor’s perspective in this blog post.
New features in Macrium Reflect 8 include automatic partition resizing, intra-daily backups, dark mode, VirtualBox support for viBoot, and ex-FAT support, he wrote.
“Partition resizing can be a tricky and irritating task to perform when trying to move a backup image from one place to another. It can really slow you down, and it can also feel stressful,” wrote Gall.
“Automatic partition resizing was one of the first features on our list when developing Reflect 8.”
Alongside existing full, differential, and incremental backups, users can now schedule more backups per day to capture fine-grained changes that Reflect previously would have missed.
Meanwhile, VirtualBox support for Reflect’s viBoot feature enables instant restoration of an image to more types of virtual machine – instead of just a Hyper-V virtual machine.
“We know that will be particularly attractive to many businesses, but we hope home users also experiment with the feature,” Gall wrote.
Read the full blog post here. Macrium has also released a 44-minute video demonstrating Macrium Reflect 8 configuration and backup in detail for the enterprise.
In the video, Alex Stevenson, project lead for Macrium’s dev team, explains how Macrium Site Manager allows organisations to manage multiple instances of Macrium Reflect in one interface. Watch the full video on YouTube.
A case study
The University of Leicester uses Macrium Site Manager and Reflect to facilitate a single point of administration for enterprise backup, including the ability to deploy the solution quickly to multiple endpoints.
According to Mark Penny, IT systems specialist at the university, Macrium Reflect backup and imaging technology has protected their IT environment since 2010 — supporting some 20,000 students and 4,000 staff across 30 departments.
With Macrium Site Manager, the IT department has a customisable dashboard for the most relevant metrics and alerts.
“In the event that we lost a datacentre and I had no servers left, I would need to get my environment back quickly. Macrium Reflect provides me with that bare-metal restore capability,” Penny said in the vendor case study.
Macrium also delivers beyond backup and disaster recovery (DR) by helping protect the university against the increase in ransomware attacks.
“It’s worth a license just to protect [backup images] with Macrium Image Guardian (MIG) because if you get a ransomware or encryption malware attack it provides you with a safety net,” said Penny.
Reports suggest ransomware attacks in particular are continuing to rise through 2021.
( Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash )
