Macrium Reflect

Macrium Reflect is a free/paid Windows only software by Paramount Software that allows you to create a system image of any x86 computer.
Such images can either be made from within the OS or using a recovery USB drive. You can store your image on internal, external or network storage.
The base home tier is free (sadly the current version, Reflect 8, will be the last free version). Business must buy a license to use it.
Macrium allows you to create an image of a system it is running from, aka you can backup your Windows install from within Windows!
Since you are creating an image of the whole drive (if you want to) it doesn't matter if you are backing up Windows, Linux, ChromeOS (not sure about MacOS, I don't own an Intel based Mac)

Macrium Reflect requires internet to download, no offline installers.

• Official website: https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
• Chocolatey:

   choco install reflect-free 

Installer sadly requires an email address, but you can use something like 10minutemail.com. After you enter your email and say No to marketing messages you should see a download link with your license key in your inbox.
Use the download utility and go through the installer like any other Windows program.
During the setup, you will have the option to install viBoot. viBoot is a cool utility that allows you to run your backed up images in Windows HyperV or Oracle Virtualbox, I recommend you install it.
After the installation finishes, Macrium will pop up automatically.

1. Select only the disk you want to create an image of and click “Image this disk…”
2. Select the partitions you want to backup and destination where you want to backup. I recommend you backup all partitions if you want to boot from this backup.
3. You can even backup to a network drive.
4. On the next page you can schedule images. We only want one right now so untick every option.
5. Finish
6. Tick “Run this backup now”. If you plan on doing this again, you can save the definition file.
7. Once you click “Okay”, your backup will start.
8. Now you wait. This is mostly a disk (and network if you are backing up to network storage) thing.
   1. If the drive you are backing up is fast, it can take as little as 10-15 minutes for a 1TB drive.
   2. If you are backing up an old laptop HDD (let's say a 10 year old WD Blue 1TB 2.5), you might be here for 2-8 hours.

You will need at least a 4GB flash drive in the MBR format, GPT aren't supported.
See here on how to format your flash drives to MBR: How to format flash drive in MBR

1. In Macrium, select Other Tasks → Create Rescue Media from the top bar.
2. Select your flash drive, select “Enable Multiboot” and click Advanced
3. In the Base WIM tab, select what fits your use the best. Default “Windows RE” is fine.
4. (Optional) If you use Bitlocker, enable Bitlocker support on the “Options” tab.
5. Check “Add WiFi support”. This will copy WiFi drivers from your current machine to the rescue USB. Useful if you want to image the machine you are making the rescue USB on and WinPE doesn't have network drivers for your hardware.
6. Once you have options you want click Build

I will be demonstrating this on a Virtualbox VM, but it applies to real hardware.

1. Boot from the rescue USB. Your boot key will either be F2, F9, F12, Delete (ThinkPads can use Enter and select in a menu)
   You might need to do the “Press any key to boot” like a Windows installer does
2. Now you can follow the "Creating an image In Windows" section. UI is identical.

1. Boot from your Macrium Recovery USB
2. On the “Existing Backups” tab select “Browse from an image file” and select your backup image.
3. In the lower half of the Macrium UI, click on your image and click “Restore”.
4. Select the partitions you want to restore (if you want it to be bootable select all of them) and select target disk you want to restore to.
5. Press Finish

1. Open Macrium viBoot
2. In the top left select “Create New”
3. On “Select Image Files” click Add and browse to your image (a .mrimg file)
4. On the next page give it some RAM (at least 4GBs), a few CPU cores (at least 2) and optionally some networking
5. After that, click Finish and your VM should boot. If it crashes, close the window and open HyperV/Virtualbox itself and launch the VM from there.

— dustojnikhummer 2023/01/05 20:30