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

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: