Saturday, October 20, 2012

Macrium Reflect Free - restoring partition / disk backups

Now with the disk backup and the rescue USB flash created earlier, we’re going through the restore process. I won’t do that on a real PC though but on a local VM, where I can take some screenshots.

Macrium Reflect running on Windows PE looks pretty much the same as in the full Windows app (and it probably is the same :-). You can browse the network (in my case) or an attached USB drive for the disk backup image.

1. Macrium Reflect - Restore, VM - Browse

Choose the “Restore Image” option and that’ll take you to the restore wizard.

Note: I’ve set up the VM display to 800x480 at first (ASUS R2H screen size) and I can see a problem as it cuts off the bottom of the wizard window. Maybe you can work around that if you learn the key sequences to push the buttons, but maybe the Windows PE might just support an external monitor you can connect through VGA? I’ve changed the VM screen to a 800x600 to move on.

2. Macrium Reflect - Restore, VM - Partitions

Select the physical destination disk and you can pick the partitions you want to restore and then click the “Copy selected partitions”. Here I will restore all 3 partitions, although you can use to only say restore the "personal” partition, and re-install the OS on the first partition later, or the other way around.

3. Macrium Reflect - Restore, VM - Partitions, destination

Click Next to get to a summary page, and then click Finish to start the restore process.

4. Macrium Reflect - Restore, VM - Progress

Leave it running, this will take a while. Although might look like like a long time, but it’s definitely shorter than having to re-install OS and applications, and certainly a lot less effort (and I should know, I’ve done this a lot).

5. Macrium Reflect - Restore, VM - Finished

Restart the system, and should now be fully restored to its previous state.

6. Macrium Reflect - Restore, VM - Restored

Now having used it end to end, I think Macrium Reflect Free is a great tool for a home user, and amazingly you get all that for free! Might sound odd, but I wasn’t paid for these last posts, I’m just genuinely surprised how easy it was and how well it worked to do exactly what I needed Smile

1 comment :

  1. Thanks a lot for saving about disk backups, Macrium Reflect is very useful post.
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