@Nick


I don't know who to address directly, so I nudged Nick about the above typo referenced in the previous post.  Surely, he can take care of it or direct it to whoever should. 

It's on the front page of the website NOW!!!

So it is!  Congrats, everyone!  It's out in the wild now.    I told you was probably coming sooner than you thought.    I was told in an e-mail a day ago it was planned for release in about 24 hours.


My thanks to the Reflect team and the other beta testers we all worked on the software with!  It was nice to get back to beta testing software again.  ImgBurn, the other software I beta test, hadn't had a new beta since 3 years ago.  So, I've had little to do on the beta testing front until I was invited in to help participate in the beta.

I'll be taking bets on how long it will be before Keith creates the first in a series of "When will Reflect V9 be released?" threads

"Version 9 will be released soon.  In a few years."  LOL

Is there a good overview about the changes? The front page https://www.macrium.com/reflect8 is quite brief about things like Intra daily backups.

+x

 

backuper - 18 May 2021 7:36 PM

Is there a good overview about the changes? The front page https://www.macrium.com/reflect8 is quite brief about things like Intra daily backups.

There's an entire knowledgebase about the new features here, with most items containing a link to pages specifically about that item.

Thanks

edit:
After checking it, it's exactely what I was looking for. I like the documentation with Macrium. It's so well made.

Without writing a textbook, can someone tell me the benefit of having/using a virtual machine, since Version 8 includes it?
I know that if you are testing new software and you don't want to install it on a production system, it's safer to use a VM, basically in a sandbox.
You could already mount an image as a new drive letter to restore any files you wanted to.
So what's the benefit?
As an extension, another question. On a server, what's the benefit of running a VM and connecting to that with work systems, as opposed to just connecting to the system without the VM?
Wouldn't that use more resources/RAM, slowing things down?

+x

 

Merlin - 18 May 2021 7:52 PM

Without writing a textbook, can someone tell me the benefit of having/using a virtual machine, since Version 8 includes it?
I know that if you are testing new software and you don't want to install it on a production system, it's safer to use a VM, basically in a sandbox.
You could already mount an image as a new drive letter to restore any files you wanted to.
So what's the benefit?
As an extension, another question. On a server, what's the benefit of running a VM and connecting to that with work systems, as opposed to just connecting to the system without the VM?
Wouldn't that use more resources/RAM, slowing things down?

The VM functionality (called viBoot) was introduced in V7.  The new part for V8 is that you can optionally use VirtualBox instead of Hyper-V.  But Reflect/viBoot doesn't "include" a VM, nor is viBoot really about using VMs for general purposes.  viBoot allows you to boot a Reflect image backup that you already have as a VM, even if that backup came from a physical system.  So let's say you have an image backup of an old system that no longer exists.  Yes if you just need to grab some files out of that backup, you can just mount it.  But what if you need to run an application that was installed on that old system that you don't have anymore, perhaps to generate a data export?  Or in an enterprise scenario, let's say you've been making image backups of a physical server and it dies, and replacement parts will take a while to arrive.  You can start the latest backup of that server as a VM on some other server in order to keep that dead server running on your network even though its original hardware is down.  Yes it will likely be slower, but it will probably be far better than having the system completely down.  And once you're able to replace the original hardware, you can make a new Reflect backup of the CURRENT state of that VM you were running during that gap, and restore that new backup onto the replacement hardware.

The question of whether you want to use VMs for whatever work you're doing is entirely separate from what Reflect offers with viBoot.

As for the server use case, sometimes you want to keep applications or server roles isolated from each other, possibly for security reasons or compatibility requirements, but you might still want to consolidate your physical hardware footprint to a single server, or perhaps a cluster of some sort.  Having multiple VMs all running on shared hardware allows you to do that.  It also allows you to shut down or restart a VM that might be hosting one application without taking down every other application as would be the case if you installed everything into a single Windows environment.  But this again has nothing to do with viBoot.