Backing up and Cloning Your Hard Drive With Macrium Reflect
Our Windows app of the week is not something you might need to use very often – hopefully – but it’s a great tool if you’re updating your system and need to move everything from your old hard drive to a new one.
In fact, that’s exactly what I did this weekend when I swapped out one of the extra hard drives for a new (larger) one. While I could just copy all the files using Windows Explorer, this means I have to go back to my computer from time to time to deal with the annoying prompts that tend to pop up when you drag and drop a huge chunk of folders to a new location. …
Macrium Reflect (free) helps bypass this, but it is even more useful when you need to back up (or clone) an entire drive, especially if you are actively using it, for example, the main Windows partition. With Macrium, you can easily create a backup or just copy the entire disk contents, partitions and everything else to a new location.
The program’s interface may seem a little complicated if you are not used to performing large-scale data migrations on your home system. However, Macrium graphs the process well (and provides a lot of hints so you don’t accidentally overwrite the wrong hard drive).
Macrium will also help you create rescue media – CD, DVD or USB stick – that you can use to launch an application on the rare occasion that the Windows operating system on your computer will not start. You can then restore a newly created disk image, or perhaps even a “just installed” image of an OS you created that already has all your favorite settings and applications installed.
In order not to forget about the very important process of backing up the contents of your disks, Macrium can also start the process of creating images on a set schedule. You can configure it to create full backups, which take some time, or both differential and incremental backups, which only take into account files that have changed since the last full or incremental backup.
Do you have a Windows app (paid or free) that you really like? Tell us about it: [email protected] .