Windows 7 backup solution: Macrium vs Handy Backup?

I have narrowed down the search to Handy Backup Professional and Macrium Reflect Pro v5.

The backup would be used for:

- Scheduled incremental Windows image backup (for disaster recovery purposes)
- Scheduled file backup

The destination backup drive is a 4TB Seagate Expansion USB 3.0 hard drive with advanced format which is currently unsupported by Windows Image backup.

Any positive or negative experiences on either product would be appreciated.

Well done!

Can't comment on HBP but I use Macrium Pro on my set up and just had to use it to restore my Data drive that had died, and it worked perfectly. I use a 4TB Deskstar in a Startech e-Sata extension.

I have a SSD for all the Windows stuff and majority of installed programs, and a main data drive for everything else including programs that prefer to keep their data with them (saves thrashing the SSD). I wish all programmers would give the option of putting Data elsewhere.

I have 2 backups that run daily, 1st of month will be a full image and then a differential backup every other day of each drive into separate sub-dirs on the destination drive, and I can keep at least 2 previous months worth of full backups

In reply to a post by sdariani:

Any positive or negative experiences on either product would be appreciated.

I use Macrium on my server. Every Sunday night it does a backup to HDD.

It's set to do a full backup on the first Sunday of a month then incrementals for the remaining Sundays. It keeps the three most recent sets(*).

It does the job reliably and I've performed several restorations to confirm that the resulting images work and can be resized to different HDDs. My only (slight) complaints are that for clever stuff you often have to write a script in Visual Basic. The editor is built-in though and there's always been examples to modify on their web site. And the UI sometimes isn't intuitive. It took me several attempts to work out how to configure the email notification service.

Other software I've used: Acronis. Horrible UI. Klunky operation. Crashes in use (although it never failed to actually create a backup).

Windows Backup: Couldn't work out how to get it to remove older backups and I want a set up and forget arrangement. I don't want to have to manually remove old sets.

Actually now I think about it it might be a differential rather than incremental but I can't remember. Either way the restoration UI just presents you with choices and it's simple enough to just choose the most recent.

(*)Where a set is full+inc+inc+inc.

Edited by Andrue (Wed 04-Jun-14 14:35:16)

Thanks, I get the feeling Macrium is a more established product and good to know it works with high capacity drives. Handy Backup was recommended by a friend but I have only managed to find a couple of sketchy reviews online.

Thanks Andrue.

Well I'm certainly leaning towards Macrium after reading the last few replies.

I agree that with Windows 7 backup it isn't possible to automatically remove old backup points making it too easy for the backup drive to fill up. I don't believe there is a remedy for this issue and another good reason to move away to a better backup software.

It also has a pretty good user base and forum and the support from the producers is good as well, software gets updated regularly and you only have to pay for major upgrades, v7 is due out later this year, I've been trialling it for about six months with no problems. Have you tried the 30 day trial version to see how it will fit in with what you need.

Also just a thought but am not sure if the 4TB HDD is supported on other than the Pro version, might be worth checking that out with Macrium

Yes I did spot the 30 day trial. Probably will end up downloading Macrium Reflect Pro and restore the image backup to a dummy hard drive. Thanks again!