I am trying to figure out which is better – Acronis or Macrium for backup or recovery purposes, especially for image files. Any thoughts on this?
To answer your question about what best suits you. I have tried both Acronis and Macrium in awhile, Free for many years and so reliable for both programs. I use Macrium primarily for live image processing inside the running Windows and Acronis to "cold " Imaging from Acronis bootable CD. In my opinion, if you just need the software to make backups and nothing else, Macrium is much simpler and of course cheaper (for the free version). If you want to use the software that is fastest, Acronis is when it runs from either the bootable CD or the installed application, usually faster than Macrium both for backup and restore.
The most important thing with backups is to test that the recovery process works.The best way to do this is to create a hard or solid state drive backup image and then restore it to a recently formatted similar drive and verify that the PC boots from the second drive and all of your software and files are present. Unless you do this, you should not be sure that when you need to restore your backups will succeed.
