Acronis? Macrium? or Other?

[ChrisGreaves]

The laptop arrived today after fifteen days traveling.
“HP 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop - Natural Silver (Intel Core i7-1255U/1TB SSD/16GB RAM/Win 11)”
I have a copy of “AcronisCyberProtectHomeOffice.exe” downloaded Feb18th (two weeks ago)
I have a copy of “reflect_setup_free_x64.exe” downloaded the same day.

I see the topic “Macrium Reflect Free being retired”
Macrium.com boasts a 30-day free trial, which seems reasonable. https://www.macrium.com/products/home says “US$69.95” which I think of as $cdn100.
Acronis at https://www.acronis.com/en-us/products/ ... urchasing/ says “$49.99 per year”
Macrium https://macrium.cleverbridge.com/604/surl-qmZTXbuOdI makes no mention of the $69.95 being a regular annual fee.

Right now I am resisting the impulse to start playing on the laptop without first making sure that I can
(1) Make a system backup to DVD
(2) Make a recovery boot from one of the two 64MB keys I bought last week
(3) Do a “ESP factory reset”
I have done what HP suggest and plugged the laptop into mains power to charge the battery.

After the ESP factory reset I should feel comfortable playing around with Win11, because one way or another I can return the system to the state that it is in today, correct?

I am eager to start using this beast; I have a volunteer project that is being held up because we agree that the Win7 DELL laptop is old, Win7 is old, and my system itself is cluttered with debris.
But I want to “do it right”

I notice at https://www.ghacks.net/2022/11/27/backu ... g-retired/ that AOMEI Backupper , Paragon Backup & Recovery Free, and Rescuezilla are suggested alternatives.
Free is good, but I am not averse to paying for something nowadays.

Thanks in anticipation of any suggestions.
Chris

[Jay Freedman]

For Macrium Reflect Home, the $69.95 charge is for 12 months of premium support. If you don't renew at the end of that year, the support ends but (as best I can tell) the program continues to operate normally. I'm not sure whether the end of support also means the end of updates, which seem to be coming once or twice a month.

[JoeP]

After using Acronis many years ago, I migrated to Windows Home Server for quite a while. When that was abandoned by Microsoft I looked at Acronis again but saw many horror stories about back failures, recovery failures, and upgrade issues. So, I rejected that. I used the free version of Macrium for a number of years until they announced it was to be discontinued. After looking around I settled on TeraByte Unlimited's Drive Image and Restore Suite. I person I've known on the internet for a number of years has used this exclusively on a fairly complex home setup. He says he has never had a backup or restore failure and he tinkers with his system enough to have used the restoration side many times. See https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/ for more information. The cost is $49.98 USD. You get a 30-day free trial. Once you buy you get all updates until the next major version is released.

[ChrisGreaves]

For Macrium Reflect Home, the $69.95 charge is for 12 months of premium support.

Thanks for this, Jay. My understanding of the discussion about Macrium-free is that it is the support for Macrium-free that is being discontinued. Is that correct?
If I were to install Macrium-Free today, support would end in ten months time.
Presumably at that time I would pay my $70 and install a newer version of what is today Macrium-Free, and hope that my old backups would function in the newer version?
Thanks, Chris

[ChrisGreaves]

... The cost is $49.98 USD. You get a 30-day free trial. Once you buy you get all updates until the next major version is released.

Thanks too for this, Joe. Another player in the same ballpark for price!
Cheers, Chris

[rgrosz78]

After using Acronis many years ago, I migrated to Windows Home Server for quite a while. When that was abandoned by Microsoft I looked at Acronis again but saw many horror stories about back failures, recovery failures, and upgrade issues. So, I rejected that. I used the free version of Macrium for a number of years until they announced it was to be discontinued.

I actually got to live through one of the Acronis horror stories, since I recommended it to a friend. After using Macrium Reflect for a short time, I just wish I had changed to it sooner.

My friend is using the free version on her home computer. I bought a license for four computers for my business - Macrium Reflect exceeded my expectations so far.

[StuartR]

I am still happy with Acronis. I use image backups, file backups, local and cloud destinations. I regularly do successful test restores.

No other product covers all of these.