Macrium Reflect is a really good backup software for Windows computers. It can backup and restore entire Windows installations in a matter of minutes. It uses VSS (volume shadow service) to create the backups. Because of the VSS, it can make a backup of the system partitions (the one on which Windows is installed) from within Windows itself.
Macrium Reflect can be added to the boot menu on Windows. This is really useful when you are not able to boot into Windows because of file corruption or some other problem. We can access Macrium Reflect from the boot menu and restore the Windows backup.
However, what will happen if even the boot menu does not work? In fact, I ran into this problem a couple of days ago. In those cases, we can use a bootable Macrium Reflect USB pendrive to use Macrium Reflect. In order to have a bootable Reflect disc or USB drive, we need to create Reflect ISO first. Here is how it is done:
- Launch Macrium Reflect and choose Other Tasks → Create Rescue Media from the menubar.
- In the Macrium Rescue Media Builder, select the option ISO File, select a folder where the ISO file is going to be saved and then click on the Build button.
- It will create a bootable Windows PE based Reflect rescue ISO image and you will see the message “Rescue media successfully created” once the ISO image is ready.
Now what can we do with this ISO image? We can use a software like Rufus to create a bootable USB drive using this ISO image. We can also use a CD/DVD burner software like ImgBurn to burn this ISO image on a blank CD. This ISO image is less than 600 MB in size so it will fit on any standard blank CD easily.