Cloning the volumes on a hard drive to a SSD simply required us to hook up the SSD via a SATA-to-USB cable, give it some power and run Reflect. Thankfully we didn’t need to create a bootable media device. What’s more, it has a rather tiny install footprint and is exceptionally quick in its operation. For most purposes, including the situation in which we needed it, this covered everything satisfactorily.

This makes it a faster alternative to most other third-party cloning and imaging programs, and as a result of utilising the Windows services it also means that the compression of imaging can be reduced up to 40%.Īs the title suggests the program is free, but is limited to imaging, cloning, accessing created images, scheduling backups and creating Linux and Windows PE bootable media. Macrium Reflect Free is a clever and well laid out GUI front-end to the built-in Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service. Thankfully someone recalled using Macrium Reflect, the Free Edition, with some success, so naturally we took a look.

It’s an easy enough setup, but the task of finding the right cloning software was more difficult than we first anticipated. We had a similar situation recently, where an SSD from a previous machine was upgraded and the old unit earmarked to become the main system drive of another PC.

Macrium reflect free users manual