Create a single backup file of a complete hard disk.

Having an optical drive to boot from a disc is much less likely.Macrium Reflect Free is a Hard Disk Imaging and File Backup Software And considering that unexpected PC migration scenario again, your next PC is guaranteed to be able to boot from USB.

That’s way more capacity than you need for Rescue Media, but I think it was about $8. I use a 16GB SanDisk Ultra Flair for this purpose. And considering how cheap small flash drives are these days, it’s not uncommon to dedicate a flash drive to Rescue Media duty. If your PC can use either one, the advantages of USB are that it will load much faster and it’s easier to update, because with a disc you either need to burn a new one or use rewritable media that can take a while to erase before you can burn it again. Some old PCs don’t boot from USB, but some new PCs don’t have optical drives. But if you just keep your old Rescue Media that lacked that capability and suddenly needed to migrate to a new PC because your old PC died unexpectedly, not having that capability would become an annoyance - which is why updating proactively can be useful.Īs for disc vs USB, it depends. That’s something that you might never need until you move to a new PC and therefore might never notice wasn’t possible with your current Rescue Media on your current PC. For example, not long ago there was an update for the ReDeploy function to facilitate migration scenarios that involved moving from a SATA to an NVMe SSD. If you don’t read those notes, then updating every now and then is generally prudent. If you read the release notes that appear when an update is available, Macrium typically prints any changes that pertain to Rescue in red text for emphasis. Great news! The reason to update Rescue Media is that occasionally, Reflect updates include fixes or enhancements that also (or exclusively) pertain to the Rescue environment.

Macrium reflect 6.0