Macrium Reflect is an endpoint and server backup and cloning solution from Macrium Software (aka Paramount Software UK), available in personal and professional editions.
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Symantec Ghost Solution Suite
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Symantec's Ghost Solution Suite is an imaging and deployment solution.
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.
Symantec Ghost Solution Suite is well suited to standard images of company approved software and standard configurations for all users. When every user has the same computer configuration, it is easily managed with a standard image across the board. It is less effective if you need to have multiple configurations for different groups. It becomes cumbersome to manage all the various images. When you add to the complexity by having to address the different drivers for the different hardware model computers, this only adds to the overall number of images you will have to manage, create and keep updated. I find Ghost most helpful with standard hardware model computers and one or two images company wide.
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.
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.
A positive impact of Ghost would be time. To deploy computers form scratch is very time consuming and labor intensive for the IT Department. Ghost clearly saves the time of the IT departments staff to quickly get a new computer out to user so they can spend their time on addressing other issues and being more productive.
Time is money. If the IT department is spending hours preparing computers and employees are out of a computer for an extended period of time waiting for one to be loaded, this is money lost to the company in paying employees to sit around and wait for a computer to be configured.
