Clonezilla vs. Macrium Reflect

CloneZilla has several scenarios where it can be used in business. Firstly the main purpose for us is for imaging of larger number of systems with varying specifications and operating systems in quick succession. However we have also used it for "point of time" imaging of systems for when employees have left the company or have a full metal backup made.

Incentivized

Macrium Reflect is one of the best partition backup applications available in the market. It can also clone drives in addition to making images of partitions and has a very useful feature of creating a bootable recovery drive for restoring partition(s) in case the OS is not booting. There are also different products for varying needs of the end user- Macrium Reflect Server, Workstation, etc. I have restored my system without any errors many times with Macrium.

Incentivized

• The ability to quickly setup imaging servers to rapidly increase the number of systems imaged.
• Handling large numbers of device imaging off a single live server instance
• Ability to run the server side of things on low end hardware

Incentivized

• Clear interface for creating drive image backups
• Reliable, every day backups
• Accessible log showing successful backups and any failures
• Creates differential backups that are small in size
• Fast, easy method for recovering individual files or folders from an image backup

Incentivized

• The interface is not easy to navigate or understand by non technical staff
• Many many key presses before an actual image starts processing
• Does not feel "clean" - in that it feels very batch driven rather than having a more simpler way of managing the process end to end.

Incentivized

• Has ransomware protection that could be better at letting users configure exeptions

Incentivized

We have not been opening tickets for support from Macrium at the moment, only for licencing issues, but good attention and fast response by the support team. They respond pretty fast to our emails and fixed our issues giving us a good explanation of our case without any complications. Due to the good functionality of the software we have not opened a ticket for support in years.

Incentivized

Whilst other imaging and deployment suites provide nicer interfaces which suit less technical staff, they do have quite significant price differences in comparison to CloneZilla. CloneZilla not only provides us a significant number of features, it provides a full imaging solution at a price which no one can compete with!

Incentivized

Veeam offers Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, a product we also install and use. It compares favorably with Macrium Reflect; however, for small firms and individual wanting an added cloud backup of their full hard drive, Macrium wins out in requiring less cloud storage space by a significant margin. ShadowProtect is a rock solid competitor with a higher price and no free version. It is highly dependable, but more complicated to install and set up. The number of technical issues and quality of technical support have ruled out Acronis products. MSP360 Backup has impressive technology, but we encountered issues with restore times and full drive image restores.

Incentivized

• CloneZilla provides us a very cheap solution for imaging of systems in our business
• It has allowed us to rapidly increase our ability to image more systems across multiple locations
• CloneZilla has allowed us to adapt and evolve our imaging environment to handle lots of different scenarios with little issues

Incentivized

• Reduce the impact of emergency situations like ransomware attacks, hardware failures, etc.
• Restore the backups quickly and reliably.
• Free version availability for commercial use is an added bonus.

Incentivized