I've used Acronis for a longer period of time, but had many issues with it especially when more than one PC was backed up on the same drive.

Yesterday, I had updated my drivers using Driver Booster Pro 3.2 and it screwed a few things up. No more graphic driver, I couldn't use my AMD Catalyst Control Center anymore and various fixes didn't work out.

I just recently downloaded Macrium and created a rescue boot CD. After booting from the CD, it automatically started the restore process which took 46 minutes and my system was back to normal.

I assume that Driver Booster was the culprit and I'm more than happy to have such an easy solution if something goes wrong again.

Thumbs up for Macrium.

You must make that bootable restore CD right away, and preferably from the machine you will restore. At the least it must be made from the same version of Windows and either 32 or 64 bit matters.

Macrium:

You can browse the image with Windows explorer and get just a file or two if needed. I like that.

Has a scheduler which will make new and delete old with fairly granular controls. Mine runs every night as I sleep making one and then deleting the oldest. I also save a couple of older ones once in a while in case I miss a problem for a while. I just drag and drop to a different folder and it can't "see" them to delete.

It uses the Windows Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and makes fast and accurate images.

Macrium and Cobian Backup (also free and excellent and using the VSS) run every night while I sleep and store to an external.

Cheers.

Been using Macrium Reflect Free for over a year now...love it...should have switched years ago.

Macrium Reflect is good but Acronis is the best. I used to use both of them. A pirated copy of Acronis never let me down but I decided to move away from pirated software and went for Macrium.

If I used Windows again I would more than gladly pay for Acronis as it saved me countless times from disaster.

Been using Macrium Reflect Free for over a year now...love it...should have switched years ago.

Acronis gave me many problems doing a restore for example. Once you have more than two back ups on one external hard drive, it can get weird with Acronis.

Macrium did its job without a problem and much easier to handle.

Macrium Reflect Free gives me everything I need for my occasional backups and recoveries...it simply works, Macrium provides frequent updates, and it's free!