Macrium drive clone for backup: reliable?

I recently migrated everything from a Win10 machine (Dell Precision M4800) to a new Win11 machine (Dell Inspiron 16). My backup solution has been to have a second drive in a USB enclosure, and do regular total clones of the three partitions using Macrium Reflect 7.3 (UEFI). That way, in case of disk crash, I have a relatively new total replacement ready immediately and can fill in gaps between clones from my automatic online data-file backup. On the old machine, I did test that after swapping the drives, the clone boots and has everything.

Windows 11 is just different enough that I am not certain that a Macrium disk clone will give me a bootable replacement. I will probably experiment by prying the laptop open and swapping the drive to see if it boots up (I hesitate since the Dell instructions about "Service Mode" are designed to instill fear and confusion). The clone has all 6 of the partitions on the original drive, but I learned the hard way that an apparent backup drive is useless if the MBR (under W10) is somehow wrong. Is there any reason to think that a total clone via Macrium won't yield a bootable drive? Is there anything in W11 that is so different that the Macrium clone will miss something?

There are later versions of Macrium Reflect 8 that would work. I have not used 7.3 in years. There also is Hasleo that you can try

I would not use any version of Macrium earlier than 8.0. I run 8.1. That said, I would never clone either. Too many reports here of "clone gone wrong". I always use imaging and restore those images in emergencies, when replacing a drive, or even to a new computer. I can restore my entire system drive in
4 minutes using 8.1's rapid delta restore.

glasskuter said:

I would not use any version of Macrium earlier than 8.0. I run 8.1. That said, I would never clone either. Too many reports here of "clone gone wrong". I always use imaging and restore those images in emergencies, when replacing a drive, or even to a new computer. I can restore my entire system drive in
4 minutes using 8.1's rapid delta restore.

Click to expand...

I have cloned many drives without any issue using 8.0, 8.1 MR and Hasleo. Like you said I would never use any version older than 8.0.

Ironically, I just happened to do this last night. I had a Mini PC with a 512GB NVMe SSD but wanted to replace it with a 1TB. I cloned to an NVMe drive in an external enclosure using Reflect X, then replaced the original with that drive. Everything worked flawlessly.

NOTE: Some apps that require activation will need to be deactivated on the original drive then reinstalled on the new drive.