Here is the black friday, usually the best time to get Macrium licenses. But this year the sale is really disappointing. https://www.macrium.com/products/home
There is no discount on single license, and only 25% on the 4 machine license. Last year it was 50%. They also introduced a stupid subscription plan, which is discounted to hell to lure people in.
But subscriptions for offline backup is a huge no-no. I won’t pay yearly ransom to use my own data on my own drives. It was one of the reasons why I ditched Acronis (and there were other reasons to be honest).
Looks like I have to start the endless search again for a good image backup software.
I was waiting on the discount to pull the trigger… I guess I don’t really need it then since Duplicacy + Veeam works well.
Veeam agent for Windows is simple and works but it is quite limited in terms of retention policies. So I use Duplicacy for my backups and Veeam is there in case Duplicacy fails or I need an image based solution because Windows crashed.
I wanted Macrium because of it’s ability to boot from an image directly where I would have to do a reinstall if I used Veeam agent for Windows.
I think I could just use Veeam community edition for the more complicated retention policies and booting from an image but the time investment is inmense. You need a dedicated Windows server, an SQL server, I think paid hypervisors in order to boot from the image directly and then time and patience to dig through the bible length manual…
I already have veeam community on win server and it is great, but… great in every sense. It needs a lot of background processes, a full-blown MSSQL server, memory, etc.
However now I think about adding agents to the windows machines and do the backup remotely. I didn’t want to do it before, because I liked the simplicity of local backup to a simple external drive.