How to create a backup image using
Macrium Reflect Free. Hi everyone. Leo Notenboom here for AskLeo.com. One of the very common instructions I give
people before doing something else, something major, is to create
an image backup of their machine. If you've never done that and if you don't know what it means, I want to show
you one of the ways to do that. As always, there are plenty of different options, different tools and so
forth, for making an image backup. But I'm going to show you today using the current version
of Macrium Reflect Free Edition. So this is something that you can download, install and create a backup
image right now for no money. And I suggest you actually do that. Let's walk through the process. So we're over here on Windows Ten. I'm firing up Edge. What I'm going to search for
is literally Macrium Reflect Free. And in fact, there are several different. You can see advertisers have
popped up here in front. What we're looking for is specifically
Macrium Reflect and the free edition. On the companion article for this video, I will have a direct link
to exactly what you want. But if you're doing this yourself,
this is what you're looking for. Macrium Free Edition. They will promote their trial
of the current version. That's kind of up to you. It's not what I'm going to do today,
but if you think that you might end up purchasing the product eventually,
the trial might be worth your effort. In the case of this example,
I don't want to go that way. I want to go completely free. Now,
even though it says commercial. I experimented with this the other day. You can actually do
the download free commercial. I'm going to do the backup at home. Reflect Eight free Download free. We're just going to go
ahead and download that. I need a personal license. I am not going to register or download.
And there it comes. You can see it's downloading an Exe. That is
actually reflects downloader program. In other words, that was
a very quick download. Running this now will actually cause
the software to be downloaded. We're going to be downloading
the free version. We're going to put it in this folder. We're going to run
the installer right away. We just go ahead and click on download. At this point, we're
done with the browser. So I'm going to go ahead and close
that as well and get that out of our way. Of course, UAC.
This installer does install things at a very low level,
requiring administrative access. Clicking next to begin the process of installing set up wizard
license Agreement Of course. Personal use. I agree that this is being installed
for personal, non commercial use. We're not going to register this again.
This one's up to you. If you want to register it,
by all means go ahead and give them. They do not spam you. They do send you some marketing stuff and you can opt out at any time,
but it's really not a problem. I'm on their list so many times that
there's no point in my adding myself. Again, installing the desktop
shortcut again, that's up to you. Normally I don't because I like a clean desktop, as you can see
from the background here. But it's all up to you. These features are for the non free version and instant VM
booting of Macron backups. We don't need that right now. All we're trying to do is get
a backup image of our machine. So we'll just go ahead and click
next and we'll hit Install. Since we're done with the installation
and we want to go directly into creating a backup image, we'll go
ahead and let it launch. Now, if we weren't here, if you wanted to come back to it later,
you'll see that there is in fact a shortcut on the desktop,
and it has been added to the Start menu and recently added as well as under M
here for Macrium and Macrium Reflect. So we'll go ahead and let this finish
and start the program right away. So what we're looking at here is
the default interface for the backup process in Macrium
Reflect version eight. There are two disks on this machine. This top line MBR disc one, it's telling me this is master boot
record as opposed to a GPT type disk. Again, irrelevant at this point, but this is showing you the different
partitions that are on the disk and it will give us the option to back up
the entire hard disk, which is this checkbox over here or
simply back up individual partitions. I recommend when you take an image of a hard disk when you're backing up
for real, that you always back up the entire hard disk unless
you have a reason not to. By backing up the entire hard disk,
the thing you're really protecting yourself from at that point
is a hard disk failure. If the disk itself
self destructs and you lose everything on it, that would imply you have lost
all of the partitions on that disk. Therefore, by having all the partitions in your backup, you can simply
restore to the replacement hard disk. There are other scenarios where you might
want to only backup, say the C partition. But that's not what
we're going to do here. And in general, it's not
what I recommend you do. The other disk here, MBR disk two,
that's my external drive. That is my USB drive that I
have connected to this machine. And in fact, you can see it has a name
notein XPS 15 backup because that's the machine it used to work on and it
has close to a terabyte of free space. What we're going to do is image
selected disks on this computer. Now, yes, it looks like we've selected all
of the disks, but if we just click on Image the selected
disks on this computer, we will now get to make the choice
of which disks to be backed up. That means I want to Uncheck
the external drive. I'm leaving the internal drive, the drive that has the C partition on it
checked, and all of the partitions in it checked so that we're backing up
the entire physical hard drive. The destination where
do I want this to go? This little folder over
here lets you navigate. It's not very obvious, but if you click on that little folder
icon, you'll get a pop up that then lets you say, okay, let's expand this,
let's go down and look at this backup drive, and I'm just going to go ahead
and place the backup image in the root of this backup drive,
which happens to be e in my case. And that's actually all it does is
it enters e colon backslash for me. I could, if I wanted to create a folder,
subfolder places to put things, whatever. Again, that's always up to you, but for just doing a single quick backup,
an example of a backup, I'm just going to write that to the root
of the edrive, the backup file name. I'm actually going to leave that alone, because what it's going to do is give me
an image ID, which will be unique for each image, and then some numbers that might be
used later if you end up doing things like Incremental or differential
images on top of this. Again, our focus here is simply to create
a single backup image of the entire machine, and that's a fine
setting to leave alone. Now, in Advanced Options,
you don't have to touch this, however, I generally do, and what I generally do,
because machines are faster than they used to be, is I go ahead
and hit high compression. That means it's going to spend a little
bit more time in the processor, compressing the data that it's
putting out on the image file. The image file itself will
be a little bit smaller. That means I can keep more images. I can keep other data
on that external drive. I could do whatever I want. I see no reason not to have it default too high unless you happen to have
a particularly slow machine. Everything else that's here. Well, maybe Auto Verify is
good to turn on as well. What that will do is once the backup image has been created,
Reflect will go back and make sure that it has what it thinks that the image was
successful, that it actually compares correctly to what was backed
up in the first place. Everything else here we really don't need to do file size has more to do with if
you're happening to back up to things like DVDs or CDs, which honestly,
nobody should be doing anymore. You could put a password
on the image if you want to. I don't, but if this is one way to secure the image from prying eyes,
verify the file system. Honestly, all this really does is run
check disk before it does the backup. There's really no need
for the backup program to do that. If you want to run a check disk yourself,
by all means, go for it. Backup Set file name prefix well, we see. We've already got the image
ID as part of the file name. We can add comments to this backup if we want to, so that the image itself can also
include a little bit of additional information about maybe why we created
this backup, or any other important information that you might want
to keep with it and then shut down. You can, in fact, let Reflect shut down
the computer when it's done backing up. In this case, like I said, we're doing a single image,
ideally in preparation for doing something else to the machine,
setting ourselves a safety net. So we're not going to shut down,
we're just going to let it run. Well, click on next.
Actually. Now this allows you to define
schedules for this back up. We're not going to do that. Scheduling is beyond the scope
of what I want to do today. Like I said, all I want to do
is create an image backup. So we're going to click next. This is a summary
of what's going to happen. We don't really have to worry about
the retention rules at this point. These are the operations
that it's going to be doing. You can see there's a separate operation for each partition on the drive
we'll click on finish. Now, there are two things
that we may want to do here. We can either run the backup now, which is of course what we're going to do,
but it also lets you save everything that you've just defined as
an XML backup definition file. I'm not going to do that. If I were setting up a backup to be
automated, if I were going to now say this is what I want to happen every night or
once a week or once a month or whatever, then yes, we would be
saving it into an XML file. But for our purposes here, we're just wanting to create a backup
as simple and as easy as we can. Run this backup now click OK,
and off it goes. Now, as you can imagine,
this is going to take a little while. How long it will take for you will depend on exactly how fast your machine is,
how much data there needs to be backed up, how fast the hard disk is,
how fast the USB interface is. If you're potentially running on an older USB, two interface, all those
kinds of things contribute. What we're going to do here is let the backup run and we will
basically fast forward through everything from now until just before
the backup completes. So enjoy. And we're done. It took 23 minutes for this
machine to be backed up. A good chunk of that was the verification phase if you were watching closely
on the progress but that's it. We've got an image. Now to confirm that we have in fact an image that we
understand and expect. I'm closing reflect here and I'm just going to go ahead and open up
Windows File Explorer this time. What we're going to do is go take a look at that backup drive and there you'll
see this file, this backup image. In fact I'm going to change one option
here to make sure that we're looking at extensions because Macrium
backup image files are .mring. This is the file that we just created and you can see that it is roughly about
30GB in size which makes sense given the amount of data that's
stored on this machine. But that's it. That was creating an image. Yes, there are other steps if you ever
need to use this image creating rescue media, restoring an image,
restoring files from an image, those kinds of steps but none of those
are possible without this step. And no matter what happens as long as you have this file you can learn
those other steps later. So I hope this is helpful. I hope this encourages you to create
backup images before you do something major to your system like upgrading
the version of the operating system or doing other major things
that you're uncertain of. By all means create an image. It is just this simple and while it takes
a little bit of time it takes a lot less time than having to recover from some of
the failures that you're protected from if you don't have a backup. For comments
for updates for related links and more, visit Ask Leo.com/29797. I'm Leo Notenboom and
this is Ask Leo.com. Thanks for watching.
