Macrium Reflect is backup and disk imaging software for Windows. It can preserve the partitions needed to recover a working system, back up selected folders, or copy a disk directly to a replacement drive. Its current personal edition is Reflect Home, powered by Reflect X.
The former Macrium Reflect Free edition is no longer available or supported. Reflect Home is paid software with a time-limited trial.
Macrium Reflect disk images
A disk image holds a compressed, sector-level copy of selected disks or partitions. That includes the information needed to restore their contents and layout. When the selection includes Windows and its required system partitions, the image can recover the operating system, installed applications and data together.
Macrium Reflect displays connected disks and their partitions graphically. You can choose individual partitions or use the Windows backup task to select the partitions needed for system recovery. Images can be saved to a local drive or a network share. Ordered alternative destinations let a job use another location when its primary destination is unavailable, which also supports rotating backup drives.
Current Reflect imaging can resume after an interruption instead of discarding the unfinished job.
Restoring files from a mounted image
A whole-disk image does not require a whole-disk restore every time. Macrium Reflect can mount a selected partition from an image as a temporary Windows drive. Assigning a drive letter makes its folders available in Explorer, where files can be copied out individually. This suits recovering a deleted document without replacing the current contents of the entire partition.
Folder backups
For jobs that only need particular folders, Reflect Home also creates file and folder backups. Each source folder can have its own inclusion and exclusion filters, including wildcard patterns for filenames and exclusions for subfolders. Volume Shadow Copy Service allows the backup to include open or locked files. These selective backups preserve files, but they do not replace a system image for recovering Windows.
Disk cloning
Cloning writes selected partitions directly to another disk rather than packaging them into a backup image. Macrium Reflect lets you select the source and destination, copy the chosen partitions, and adjust the destination layout before the operation starts. The target can retain the original partition sizes or resize supported partitions to use a different capacity.
This makes cloning useful when replacing a drive while retaining its Windows installation and files. Cloning can overwrite existing partitions on the destination disk, whereas creating an image saves the selected contents inside a backup file.
Backup types, schedules and retention
Reflect Home supports full, differential and incremental backups.
| Backup type | What it records | Restoring it requires |
|---|---|---|
| Full | All selected data | — |
| Differential | Changes since the full backup | Its full backup |
| Incremental | Changes since the preceding backup | The earlier files in its chain |
Schedules can combine these types rather than repeat a full copy every time. Saved backup definitions retain the source selections, destinations and settings, while conditions can limit jobs to AC power, wake a sleeping computer or run a missed task when possible.
Retention rules control how many backups remain or how long they are kept. Reflect manages dependent files when removing older sets and can consolidate incremental backups to maintain a usable chain.
Rescue media
Macrium Reflect’s bootable rescue environment provides access to image recovery when Windows cannot start. It can locate images on local storage or connect to a network share. After selecting a restore point, you choose the destination disk and partition layout; Reflect handles the earlier backup files needed for a differential or incremental restore.
Rapid Delta Restore can update an existing copy of an imaged NTFS file system by restoring the changed data instead of rewriting everything. Other file systems use a full restore, as does an operation that shrinks the destination partition.
