It's that data that Reflect uses to make its determination about whether to restore anything in the RDR mode. For RansomeWare to modify file content on your System, it must change the file's MetaData in the process. I have been using RDR exclusively since the v6 release in 2015. Surprises aren't surprises if you look at the comparison matrix of products HERE at Macrium. My files on my file server are another story, and those are replicated to a second physical drive, with a 7 day rotation and they get copied out to multiple external drives. Another was on Jan 3rd, after I installed most of the software that I use and the games I didn't want to have to redownload. One on Jan 1st as it was clean, just the drivers and OS. I just looked at Macrium and I have only run 2 backups on my new box. My games all have cloud saves, so worst case scenario I redownload them again.so I don't have any concerns with backing those up. My VM's are just for testing and experimenting with. I keep the games and the virtual machines on their own partition.

My desktop hosts mainly games and virtual machines.

Vast majority of my dataFiles are in OneDrive due to owning 365.so I worry less about frequent backups of those.My pictures (from my phone) are sent automatically to OneDrive, from my Camera they go on a file server.My browser bookmarks are stored in the cloud via google.But then again, I don't have a lot of 'data' stored directly on my workstation. Personally, the free version does what i need it to do.

Imaging the OS and any data partitions allows you to browse those if you need to recover data.Yeah, it's all going to come down to the user. The simplicity of not having to store all intermediate backups if just doing incremental isn't worth the terouble IMO. A few here won't agree - but my own view is that for most domestic users who don't have TB of data is that the FREE version is perfectly good enough - for backing up the OS if the OS is on an SSD shouldn't take more than 15 mins even on quite old equipment.

Macrium reflect free vs home