Macrium Reflect Free Edition

Backing up your data has become a fact of life in the 21st century. Whether it is on the cloud, on a portable USB stick, or to some external hard drive, methods exist for users who are proactive enough to put a fail-safe in place.

The ability to back stuff up internally is also an option, but there are also more advanced methods to safeguard your data against corruption or various failures. Macrium Reflect Free Edition is supposed to do just that by giving you the ability to back up your drives in several forms.

The design of backup apps has always seemed a bit cryptic to understand. Macrium Reflect’s interface is not the most minimalistic, but it does the job insofar as it clearly shows you what can be done and how it can be achieved.

Upon booting the app, the thing you first notice is probably the drive section, which shows your disks and their available storage. By way of using the menu on the left, users have the option to clone a drive or more on their machine, along with the capability of creating an image file for Windows’ back-up and restore function.

There is also a backup solution for files and folders, but that can only be accessed via the Home edition.

Aside from the features mentioned prior, users can also restore their drive image through the app. Doing so will make Macrium Reflect create a new partition of that particular image, fully accessible through File Explorer and/or the app itself.

An option to clone a specific disk is also available. This facilitates transferring your data to a new storage unit to a great extent — the fact that you can clone an entire drive, which you can boot up and view in File Explorer, is great to have when you’re looking to backup your stuff.

Macrium Reflect is a solid app. It has a few paid tiers that empower the app even further, but the free version offers sufficient features for the casual user looking to protect their data.