.svg)
Macrium Reflect 8.1 was first released on the 10th of January 2023. This article includes the new features that were included in Macrium Reflect 8.1. Extended support for Macrium Reflect 8 will end on the 8th of October 2025. To continue receiving support and product updates, it is recommended that customers migrate to Macrium Reflect X. This article contains more information about the new features that are included in Macrium Reflect X.
This article contains information about the features as they were released in Macrium Reflect 8.1; due to ongoing improvements to features, the information in this article may now be out of date.
We've rewritten the imaging code and markedly improved the speed of creating disk images
Macrium Reflect 8.1 uses a new pipelined parallel processing implementation for reading, writing, and processing of data, such as hashing, compression, encryption, etc, by maximising the available system resources. This highly scalable implementation vastly reduces the overhead and drastically improves the speed.
By doing so, resource utilisation by Reflect will increase, for example, compression and encryption tries to use all the CPU cores. The user can control the resource/bandwidth allocations for Macrium Reflect to prioritise other applications.
There may be no speed improvement if the same target storage with v8.1 was a bottleneck when imaging with v8.0. This could be true for network and USB connections.
The screenshots below show the time taken to complete a backup of the same disk using 8.1 and 8.0 imaging modules.
Interactive backups can now be run in the background.
Reflect 8.1 adds a new option to allow backups to be run in the background, therefore allowing users to continue using the Reflect GUI to perform other tasks. Restarting Reflect will show any existing background task status.
The new option can be accessed at various stages as detailed below:
Other Tasks > Edit Defaults and Settings > Advanced Settings > Advanced Backup Settings
By default, it is set as 'Prompt', which means an option dialog below is prompted whenever users try to run an existing backup definition file via the 'Run Now' option. Changing it to Interactive or Background makes the backup run interactively or in the background without any prompt.
The user can selectively override the option by selecting the 'Prompt' option from the 'Run Now' pop-up menu above. In this case, an option is shown and the user can select whether to run interactively or in the background for once. Selecting 'Set as the default execution mode' will sets the selected option for all the tasks, and will have the same effect as settings in Other Tasks > Edit Defaults and Settings > Advanced Settings > Advanced Backup Settings.
The option is also available when creating a backup definition file and is only honoured once.
A new 'Task Status' tab has been added and remains shown once a backup is selected to run in the background.
This new feature allows multiple backup jobs to be queued. A new unified 'Tasks' tab shows a list of active scheduled backups and user-run background jobs all in one place.
Tasks can be moved in the queue using the 'Move Up' and 'Move Down' toolbar buttons and context menu.
Use the 'Delete' button or context menu to remove a background task from the queue.
Backup bandwidth throttling
Note: Not Reflect Home or Free Editions
A default rate limit for new backup definitions can be set for writing to the destination. This will limit the write rate to a specified number of Mb/s (megabits per second). This can be used to help manage bandwidth when performing backups over limited network connections.
This option can be accessed via Other Tasks > Edit Defaults and Settings > Backup Defaults > Imaging Rate Limit and will set the option for any new backup definitions.
In the backup progress, a higher transfer rate than the rate limit may be displayed. This is because the transfer limit counts the amount of data read from the source disk and saved into the backup file without including compression.
After backup is completed, the read and write rates are shown in the backup log.
Existing and new backup definitions can be changed via the 'Advanced Options' when editing or creating backup definition files. See below.
New interface for Exchange granular restore
In place of the old Mailbox Restore wizard for restoring individual emails and folders, we have the new Granular Recovery dialog. This can be accessed in Reflect under Existing Backups > Exchange Tasks > Exchange Granular Recovery.
This new dialog allows for much easier previewing of backed-up emails in an Exchange backup, as well as more flexible options for searching and filtering folders. It's now possible to restore just the emails matching a particular search, rather than being restricted to individual emails or entire folders. In addition, this new dialog will run much more quickly than the old Mailbox Restore wizard, especially with larger Exchange backups.
For more detailed information about these features, you can download the Macrium Reflect 8 knowledge base here.