On the bright side, the free version of Reflect spawns only a single background process, down from the three that the pay versions create. Backup generally takes place during off hours or in the background, so we don’t lend performance a lot of weight in our evaluations.

That’s about two minutes slower than any of the competition, though CPU usage was minimal. That might be nice, as Reflect Free 6 took just over nine minutes to perform our 115GB system backup.

Macrium claims increased performance for the latest version 7, of which a free version is promised soon. PE allows driver injection (adding them at restore time), so you’re likely okay there anyway. It also lets you choose the drivers you want to install. Reflect Free supports both MBR and GPT disks (it was late to the GPT game), and it has a great boot media creator, which lets you change flavors of Windows PE to best suit the operating system being backed up.

Several flavors of the Windows PE boot environment are supported by Reflect Free 6

Reflect free