I can only guess... YES (maybe eventually)! Without network access available during the PE session, I'm not sure how they would know the SUBSCRIPTION has expired. Buit software engineers are very clever when necessary
Macrium has said that Rescue Media does not expire. That even applies to builds created by 30-day trial versions, since Macrium realized that anyone with a bit of determination could adjust their BIOS clock to thwart the time window, and they weren’t willing to make life more difficult for their legitimate customers by doing things like requiring Internet connectivity in Rescue to verify true date and time, subscription status, etc.
If they offered the same status as Disk Genius does, then you would have a product that you could continue with, just not receive additional updates/upgrades until you re-subscribe. That type of offering wouldn't be too bad at all...
The real FREE version went EOL in January 2024... that's why Macrium offers no link to it anywhere on their site. It's fully operational... until some future version of Windows breaks it. At that time, they may or may not update it (I doubt it).
I have nothing special to add but I would just like to summarize the useful explanations given here about what "subscription" could mean: * see Leo in his post (https://resource.dopus.com/t/subscription-pricing/48148/9): ---> So we have: either a) a sort of "soft" subscription (or "update/upgrade subscription"): or b) a sort of "total" subscription: (With nothing or - like obviously in the case of Macrium - only with a very limited possibility to use the software any longer.) At least for subscriptions of type b I do not think that you belong to a minority when you dislike them.
Oh, well that shows how far out of the loop I am. I thought it was next year. At least I have my answer whether it will keep on working - It does for now, until as you say, Windows breaks it. My machines aren't compatible with Win11 + anyway, so may end up Linux boxes.
@Peter 123 I think of a subscription as "If you stop paying, then the product no longer functions." In the specific case of Reflect, Macrium added the "restore-only" mode because they recognized that customers might not like the idea of having to keep a subscription active (or revive it) purely to retrieve data, potentially long after they had stopped making new backups. Some people use Reflect as a long-term archiving solution. I think that was a wise and customer-friendly choice on Macrium's part. The other model of "Subscribe to updates, but if you stop paying, then your current version keeps working," is pretty rare on its own. Typically when a vendor wants to offer that model, they offer a subscription to overall vendor support, and upgrades to any major releases that drop during your active support period are included as part of that contract. That is precisely the arrangement that Macrium had on their business-oriented versions (everything other than Home) even before V8 went subscription-only. This arrangement is pretty common in the enterprise world overall. The reason it's rare to see that model without support as part of the arrangement is because it would inevitably lead customers to ask, "Why should I pay every month/year until a new release arrives at some unknown future time, getting no value in the meantime, rather than just waiting for the new release to actually drop and then decide whether to buy it at that point?" Getting customers onboard with a subscription in this scenario would require either a) a subscription price much lower than the one-time purchase price, or b) a "reinstatement penalty" if customers want to re-subscribe to get the new version. Macrium implemented the latter model with non-Home V8, whereby upgrading from a prior release when you didn't have active support involved paying whatever you WOULD have spent to keep your support active since it lapsed, up to a maximum of 18 months of support costs. The only other situation I can see that model working would be if the product was very new and therefore significant updates were being delivered very frequently.
Your not in the minority I hate subscriptions too. I just found out about this. Sucks. Hopefully not until version 9 I will just stay on 8 then try to find a alternative if it actually happens with subscriptions. Hopefully there is enough push back that subscriptions does not happen but doubtful.
Does Retention policy work for any backup tasks (manually run + scheduled), or only for scheduled tasks?
The retention policy is for the backup chain. If you GFS into the chain, separately IntraDaily into the chain or MANUALLY image into the chain... retention will apply. I constantly place manual snaps (INCs) into my chain randomly so for the retention to make sense for INCs I must use #of days rather than # of backups for its setting. Please remember, as soon as you delete a "parent," the child is gone.
All backups except those run in Rescue, where retention policies are not specified or evaluated. But otherwise, the wizard includes a retention policy step, and that is used whether the backup is later run as a schedule, manually invoked from a definition file, or run purely as a one-off with no definition file.
Yesterday evening I installed Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Because I run a custom bootloader on my hard drive, I always install grub in the Ubuntu partition itself. For the previous install (Ubuntu 23.10) I could use the legacy installer to do that. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 24.04 does no longer offer a legacy installer. Therefore, I inserted an extra (empty) USB stick during installation and chose to install grub on the start of that drive. Unfortunately, Ubuntu still installed grub at the start of my regular hard drive instead. Of course I had a backup made using Macrium Reflect and restored that, including overwriting the MBR, after which I could use my custom bootloader again. Now this is my "problem": I can no longer make incremental backups. Apparently the image ID did change? I guess Ubuntu overwriting the start of my HD caused this? But why did the Reflect restore not fix this?
With an MBR disk, Reflect uses the “signature” to determine whether it’s the same disk. It’s conceptually equivalent to the GUID of a GPT disk. I don’t know GRUB, so I’m not sure if it would have changed this. Another possibility is that it may have created another partition somewhere by shrinking or repositioning an existing partition. That can all block Reflect from appending new backups to an existing set. If you want to figure out exactly what happened, make the new Full, then go to the Existing Backups tab (or Restore tab pre-V8 ) and select your new backup to see the partition map it contains above. Compare the MBR signature and the partition quantities and exact sizes you see there with the same info you see when clicking a pre-change backup.
Whether Reflect changes a disk ID depends on the circumstances of the operation. It's not configurable. Macrium has a KB article about this here: https://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW80/Understanding Disk IDs The restore operation you described shouldn't have changed the disk ID. But if you find that it's different, perhaps from GRUB, then I guess you could try manually setting the Disk ID to whatever you want by using Diskpart through Command Prompt in the Rescue Media environment (since the disk has to be offline for an ID change). But if the reason is that the partition map changed, then one option would be to restore the entire disk from the backup to put everything back as it was, although that may or may not be a practical option in your case.
Thank you for that link. This explains why the restore did not fix the Disk ID (I only restored a single partition).
XIII, I noticed the same issue with Ubuntu 24.04. Not being able to install grub to a partition in a MBR system. You can do it with Mint 21.3 but the next version will probably be different.
Brian K, Each *nix distro installer tends to its own grub installation idiosyncrasies. Not easy to overcome for MBR booting. For EUFI-GPT booting, however, it's often best and easiest to create a grub installation that is independent of all of them in its own EFI system partition (see here) and set it as the system primary for all installed OSes. P.S.: In that case, most UUID issues can be avoided by using partition labels in that primary grub installation's boot menu such as: menuentry 'Linux Ubuntu' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { insmod part_gpt insmod ext2 search --no-floppy --set=root --label rootUbuntu configfile /boot/grub/grub.cfg }
Hi jphughan just because i guess the last free version was v6 isn't v7 seems pretty strong and stable thanks
