Macrium Reflect vs. Symantec Ghost Solution Suite

Macrium Reflect is one of the best partition backup applications available in the market. It can also clone drives in addition to making images of partitions and has a very useful feature of creating a bootable recovery drive for restoring partition(s) in case the OS is not booting. There are also different products for varying needs of the end user- Macrium Reflect Server, Workstation, etc. I have restored my system without any errors many times with Macrium.

Incentivized

It helps to manage the mass of computers we use. We use GSS to see where and who deployed software to what computers. This can particularly be helpful when dealing with license usage, and tracking how many licenses we have left, and where those licenses have been used. We are able to use it to manage clients.

Incentivized

• Macrium Reflect ist easily manageable.
• Macrium Reflect backs up fast.
• Macrium Reflect accurately handles scheduled backups.

Incentivized

• Ghost Cast [Server} gets the job done.
• Easy to use.
• Nice UI.

• I can't think of anything which needs improvement at the moment.

Incentivized

• Even though Ghost Solution Suite saves configurations, software settings and installation within the image, there is still some manual configuration that needs to be done once the image is complete.
• Installing Drivers for specific models of computers. With Ghost Solution Suite, it can be difficult to get the drivers for all the hardware of all the different model computers, so you have to create different images for different model computers. It would be nice to have the ability to have a hardware independent image for all model computers
• Image Size. Ghost does have compression to reduce the size of the image, but when you have to store all the drivers within the image it increases the total size of the image you need to manage.

Incentivized

There is a small learning curve in the beginning, but altogether a great tool for my purpose.

Incentivized

We have not been opening tickets for support from Macrium at the moment, only for licencing issues, but good attention and fast response by the support team. They respond pretty fast to our emails and fixed our issues giving us a good explanation of our case without any complications. Due to the good functionality of the software we have not opened a ticket for support in years.

Incentivized

Veeam offers Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, a product we also install and use. It compares favorably with Macrium Reflect; however, for small firms and individual wanting an added cloud backup of their full hard drive, Macrium wins out in requiring less cloud storage space by a significant margin. ShadowProtect is a rock solid competitor with a higher price and no free version. It is highly dependable, but more complicated to install and set up. The number of technical issues and quality of technical support have ruled out Acronis products. MSP360 Backup has impressive technology, but we encountered issues with restore times and full drive image restores.

Incentivized

Based on our particular company needs, we selected Ghost primarily for the cost. There are better products out there to deploy new computers. KACE was one of the products tested. I used KACE at a previous company and I can say KACE is a more effective deployment method, but the cost prevented us form going with this product. Also, since we have one single standard image it was very easy to manage Ghost for all our employee computers. We also standardized to one single hardware model computer which also made the decision to use Ghost easier.

Incentivized

• Improved our time on backups
• More secure backups of our databases

Incentivized

• Initial setup took a long time to nail down. Once support figured out the issues, it was smooth.
• After implementation, capturing and deploying images were smooth.
• Being able to quickly deploy software, or move users to new AD groups, or manage power of the machines quickly made us enjoy the software even more.

Incentivized