The disc can boot your PC into Microsoft’s Windows PE (pre-installation environment) 2.0, which requires 500MB of memory and is intended for Vista users. When you’re done, just choose to “detach” the backup and the disk disappears from Explorer.Īs well as the now obligatory boot menu option, a recovery CD/DVD or ISO image can be burned, and – in one of Macrium’s best features – three choices are available.

At the moment you need Reflect installed, but Macrium plans to release a Windows plugin later in the year to allow browsing without the software.

Restoration is simple enough, and you can browse your backups by mounting the complete original file structure of the set as a new disk within Explorer (Reflect does this for you with one click). The combined backup set and VBScript options can be run from within Macrium Reflect, but the utility can also generate MS-DOS batch files, as well as desktop shortcuts, for individual backup tasks. But the best part is that if you know VBScript, you can edit the raw file yourself, adding in pretty much any tasks or tweaks you can think of. There’s an option to automatically handle Vista’s annoying UAC interruptions (if you haven’t already disabled UAC), and a full schedule can be set with the usual daily, weekly and monthly options. Right-click on it and select the option to generate a VBScript file: this allows the usual tick-box application of advanced options such as logging, auto-shutdown, email integration and automated task execution upon start or completion of the backup. The differences from the big guns become evident at this point, as the backup set is then saved as an industry-standard XML Backup Definition file.

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