[GUIDE] How to back up a system or clone a drive with Macrium Reflect

aphanic

There is plenty of information on the topic already, but I thought a thread in here wouldn't hurt so here we go. I was unsure about where to post the thread, no category seemed appropriate so I'll guess this one will have to do.

Recent tweaks to the forum software also made it impossible to write the whole guide in a single post, there are character limits now! Which works for our advantage as well because I'll be splitting the guide in different posts and linking to them here in the starting point:

1. Installation of Macrium and creation of a recovery media
2. Creating a backup of a system
3. Restoring a backup
4. Cloning one drive into another
   

So, here we go, you've got a new external drive you'd like to use to make backups of your current machine, or maybe you bought a new SSD to replace the HDD or add to your current setup and just don't know how. I'll show you one way of doing it, with the free version of Macrium Reflect, but there are plenty more. From those Acronis' rebrands that are generally available with new hardware to free open source behemoths like Clonezilla.

First you need to acquire the program so head off to their site and you'll get a downloader that looks like this when run:



Select the options you want (just plain Reflect is good enough and click the Download button, the installation itself is pretty much the typical Next -> Next -> Next Windows is famous for, but since there's a license agreement in there I ought to tell you to read it

Anyway, once you open the program you'll be greeted with a window like this one:



Showing you the disks you have connected to your machine and you'll be in the Backup tab by default. You can already see the cloning and imaging (read: backing up) of the disk right there as buttons below each of the disks you have in the machine, but, I'd like to cover something first.

There's something called recovery media, it's good to have one around in case you get to a point where the machine stops booting. For example, you can have a USB stick you could use to restore any of the previous backups you had done and bring things back to a sane state.

To create one, head over to the "Other Tasks" menu and choose "Create Rescue Media...":



And you will see a number of options, one of which is adding it to the Windows Boot Menu, which can be useful... to a point, because if you can't really get to the boot menu (now that Windows prefetches stuff first before showing the boot menu like in Windows 7 times) you're out of luck.

If you go for that route though, at the start of your computer you'll see something like this:



I think they're way more interesting any of the other options though, either creating a recovery CD/USB or creating an image to be later burned into a CD or copied to a USB stick. You will see any USB drive you have plugged into your machine listed as an option by the way, although if it has a GPT partition table it will be off-limits (at the time of writing this at least).

Let's go over the process of creating a bootable ISO:



You can choose for example whether you want to have to press a key to boot from the media, or if you want it to boot straight away (the default being pressing a key). If you go into the Advanced options you'll find some interesting things to add:





The first tab is where you choose the base for your image, I suggest you leave it as is, electing to use WinRE (the Windows Recovery image, based on the current Windows version you're running), because among other things you'll be able to add WiFi support to it. You'll see it being greyed out in the screenshot above, but that's because I was doing it on a VM and I only had wired networking there. If you do it in your own PC it can even add the profile of your WiFi networks so you don't even have to input any password when connecting .

It is also possible to use a custom WIM image for those of you who're more advanced users and have already a customized WinPE based image you'd rather use. As for this guide, WinRE it is with BitLocker and WiFi support

And this is what you see when you boot from the image it creates:



You'll see a very basic Windows-based live environment, with Reflect opened already and defaulting to the Restore tab. There's a command prompt and a file manager as well as an utility to take screenshots at the bottom left, which could prove useful depending on what you need to do (for example, since it's Windows you have full access to DiskPart ).

I won't mislead you, there are features shown in there that are not part of the free version of Reflect. For example ReDeploy, which is a nice addition that simplifies the steps of making a backup in a machine and restoring it to a totally different one (or switching from AHCI to RST and vice versa). That comes with the paid version, but for a free program (even commercially!) I find it to be quite useful.

aphanic

Anyway, let's go back to the topic of backups, and back to the version installed in Windows. For demonstration purposes, let's say we want to make a backup of our current system (both OS and personal data, everything) to an external hard drive we've just plugged in.

Open Reflect and you'll see both disks displayed there, choose to image the first one which is the internal disk:



And the following window will appear:



Now, recommendations. If it's a one off backup, as in you're doing this once and not in a regular basis, I'd say it's better to use your own backup filename instead of one based on the ID of the image. Think that everything is going to be packed inside of a file, if the file is named EF96DE4142C45C7D-00-00.mrimg for example, two months later you're going to be thinking "just what the hell did I have here...?". If you name it for example, "Working copy of Windows 10 2004" you know what's in there.

In the advanced options at the lower left you can choose the back up compression rate for example, as well as whether you'd want to verify the backup or not. I recommend you do, right after the backing up process is done. What good is a backup if it is corrupted? Many times people think they have their data backed up, but when it's time to recover from a crash or something they discover the backup is actually corrupted and good for nothing.



By the way, the second option listed there, "Make an exact copy of the partition(s)" is geared towards forensic operations more than anything, it makes a bit by bit copy of the original disk so it requires as much space as the original disk, generally you won't want to go this route.

The next screen appears only when you're doing backups from the installed version, not in the bootable rescue media because it makes no sense, it has to do with scheduling. There are plenty of options again, you can do a one off (like I'm doing in the example, hence select None as a template and leave everything blank) or setup a complex backup solution with a full copy once a month for example and then differentials every week or something else, it's entirely up to you.

I do believe incremental backups to be part of the paid plans though, don't quote me on that but it will surely be explained in their site.

If you're just making a backup and that's it, you can skip that screen altogether and continue on:



Next you will be asked if you want to save the definitions of the schedule you just wrote, since I chose to do this just once I don're really need to save any definition so "Run this backup now" and "OK" it is:



Upon clicking OK, the process will begin. Because we're making a backup of a working system Reflect will create a shadow copy of the volume that's being used, think of it as a snapshot, it'll freeze the state of the drive at some point. Once done you'll see the following screen:



And you'll have a file, either named after the name you chose or with an ID at the location you chose:



One thing that could be useful to you is that you don't have to restore the image to access its contents. For example, say you deleted a nice background you had and you want to get it back, but it is in the image. No problem, you can explore it in the File Explorer as if it were just another drive. Right click the image file and choose "Explore image":



You'll then be asked to which partitions you want to access.

If you don't know what the hell a partition is, think they're portions of the disk for different purposes. In the example there are 4: A boot one (not interested), a Microsoft reserved one (not interested either), the main one (that's the one we want) and one that holds the recovery image (not interesting either right now). So I'll just choose the big one and choose to have access even to restricted folders, just in case, but keeping it read-only because I just want to get a picture out of there, not add anything:



After clicking OK, it will be assigned a letter and appear in This PC as usual, only with a fancy icon:



And when we're done we just unmount it:

aphanic

Restoring images, now it's getting interesting isn't it? Because if you're reading this it means something has gone wrong and you need to go back to a previous backup, unless you're just learning how to do it.

For the example, I'm going to simulate the scenario in which my internal drive gave up the ghost so I had to buy and install a new one, which will be empty then. Because of that, I won't be having access to the installation of Macrium I had done, I'll have to rely on the rescue media I had created.

The only thing we'd be needing for sure is a reliable image, for example the factory one of an Acer A515-54 from last year, but it could very well be any you have created. As long as it contains it all, all of the contents of the system (because remember that we're under the assumption that our old drive was dead, so we need it all), we're golden.

So boot up the rescue media and browse for the image you want to restore:



Once you have selected it you'll be presented with something like this:



Where you'll see the original drive where it came from (a Kingston RBUSNS8 12.3 in the example) the amount of partitions it had (similarly to the other backup we had taken previously there's an EFI one, a Microsoft reserved one, the big one, the one were the OS is actually installed and a recovery one).

We'll be restoring it all our new disk, but to make matters more realistic I chose the new disk to be bigger than that 256 GB SSD it was taken from . Click on Restore Image and you'll get to the following screen, where you're asked where you want it to be restored:



It is going to be easy knowing where to restore it because the disk that I just plugged in was empty, but if now pay attention, you don't want to override the data off the wrong disk with the recovery:



In any case, if you want it to be as easy as possible, just click Next. All of the partitions were already selected and so Macrium defaults to copy them all in their original state, but we'd be wasting space because our new drive is bigger. So we'll do it one by one, which is easy as well, you just have to start from the beginning and drag and drop partitions from the top part which is the backup to the bottom part which is the disk. But don't drag them all just yet! Leave the recovery one for now:



Now, what we're going to do is to enlarge the big partition, the one holding all of our data but keeping enough free space so we can drag the recovery partition afterwards. Notice that the Recovery partition (#4 in the backup, named Recovery (G:)) has a size of 1024 MB, of which 400.3 MB are in use. Easiest thing we can do is enlarge the 3rd partition leaving 1024 MB in the end.

Because that partition was the last one to be dragged it is already select it, but otherwise click on it and then click on "Restored Partition Properties" down below and you'll see this:



Plenty of options huh? Fret not, the only one that interests us right now is that "Free Space" setting, we need to leave at least 1024 MG of free space to be able to copy the recovery partition as is.

This screen is also important if it were the other way around, if you were restoring a backup to a disk that has less space than the original one. The right thing to do there would be to reduce the size of the bigger partition so the others fit right in. You can see in that screenshot that there's a button reading "Minimum Size", that's the minimum size we could choose for this particular partition. I would prefer doing it by hand and just reducing enough space for all of the partitions to fit if it were a smaller disk, but you have a reference there.

Anyway, I digress, in this case we just want to have 1024 MB of space left afterwards so...



And after OK-ing:



There we go, the 3rd partition is now bigger and we have enough space to drag and drop from the backup the Recovery partition onto our new disk. By the way, all of these changes we're making are purely for us to see, no disk was modified yet, we're just configuring how things are to be done so don't be afraid of making mistakes, notice there is an "Undo" button in the middle of the screen in-between the disks. You could even start all over if you so desired.

Continuing on, I drag and drop the Recovery partition and click Next, and then Finish. There's a screen after clicking next where you can verify the changes that are to be done, just as a precaution but because this was a simple restoration there was nothing useful to see there. It's interesting to note that Reflect will issue a TRIM command after the recover process is completed, which for most of you may not mean anything, but it is done to indicate the SSD (if there's any) which blocks are free to be disposed of if necessary.

The recovery process will take some time, certainly not as much time as reinstalling or resetting Windows and even in the virtual environment I'm running it that has some penalties because the actual "new 512 GB disk" resides on an external USB disk of mine so... it's not as fast as if it were done in real hardware. And yet you can have your system up and running restoring it from a full image with all of your programs installed and ready to go in less than half an hour for sure. This restoration for example only took 8 minutes and the image was in a USB disk going to a different USB disk, having full backups of our system, regardless of the software we use, I'm using Macrium Reflect for this guide but it could be... Acronis, or Ghost, Veeam, Clonezilla, whatever; it doesn't matter, is quite useful and can be a time saver should something happen to our system.

Anyway, after rebooting the machine we'll be good to go! In this case I had to go through the initial setup of Windows because that image was took before the machine was ever booted, but otherwise I'm left with a clean system as Acer intended:

aphanic

Next in line, cloning, is it any different from restoring an image in a disk that is brand new and has nothing on it? Nope, it's exactly the same thing, in fact apart from the fact that we chose to restore an image instead of cloning a disk the process is pretty much the same.

We'll start by pressing the "Clone this disk..." text that appears below the disk we want to clone. I'm going to go with the initial example, the one in which I had installed Windows 2004 in a 60 GB disk:



I bet you already know this next part... but this one we'll go with a slightly smaller disk, just to show the two examples:



So select the disk and start drag and dropping partitions until you reach the main partition, if you just click next, or try to use the "Copy selected partitions" button with all of them selected you'll be greeted with the following error:



So one by one it is, and after you copy the big one, named 20H1 in this example go to its partition recovery settings and leave some 500 MB left at the end, because in this case the recovery partition that sits at the end of the disk seems to occupy just 497 MB:



And then you'll have enough space to drag and drop the last remaining partition:



Next, Finish, and that's it! Disk cloned!

A word of warning now, the disk has been cloned, which means it is identical (save the size of the partitions if you will) to the old one. What would happen if you left them all in there like that? Who would be the one booting first and all?

As with many things in life, there are many solutions to this:

1. Solution the 1st: Get rid of the old disk, if you disconnect the disk the problem is done, there's just one disk the machine can boot from right?
2. Solution the 2nd: Get into the BIOS and choose the boot order. This varies from computer to computer, in some it is easy as a pie in others it seems Mission Impossible. Generally it's not so hard.
   
3. Solution the 3rd: Get rid of the EFI partition in the old disk 😈 (or set the primary one as inactive if it's MBR partitioned). If the machine uses UEFI to boot and there's no EFI/ESP partition in one disk, it can't boot from that disk. You could do that directly from there using DiskPart, but I think I'll detail that maybe in another post in the thread.
4. Solution the 4th: Delete every single partition in that old disk, create just one and use it to store data for example. This one must be one of my old times favorites, because if the disk is a 2.5'' SATA disk it can always be taken out of the machine and be put into a SATA to USB enclosure (a cheap one would do fine) and you have yourself a portable hard drive.
   
   However! Make sure the system boots fine after the cloning! Because some things may have changed that require different steps. Windows is pretty smart for somethings but pretty dumb for others, and if you're going from a mechanical 2.5'' HDD to an NVMe SSD it may be more interesting to just install Windows anew, but that's just me, your millage may vary as it's usually said.

I'm sure there are even more solutions, it never amazes me the creativity we have when we're presented with a problem.

Anyway, I hope you learned something reading this topic and it serves you well, if you have any doubt don't hesitate to ask, I'll try to answer if I understand or know what the question is about or tell you "I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you're on about" and direct you somewhere where you could be helped haha.

Andrepartthree

I can't believe no one left a comment yet saying what a wonderful guide this is thank you so much for all your hard work :) ... by any chance have you tried this with a Windows 11 acer computer and if so did the free version of Macrium Reflect work out for you? I'm guessing you probably already know this but Microsoft will force us all to upgrade to Win 11 come October 2025 so we can keep getting our security patches from Microsoft :) ..