Macrium brings bare metal restore to CoPilot+ Windows PCs

UK-based Macrium has added native bare metal restore for CoPilot+ Windows PCs to its Reflect X backup product.

CoPilot+ is Microsoft’s brand for Qualcomm Snapdragon devices, representing Microsoft’s third attempt to build an Arm-powered PC/laptop franchise paralleling x86. Macrium, formerly known as Paramount Software UK Ltd, started out as a disk image backup utility for Windows using Volume Shadow Copy Services for point-in-time backups. Its Reflect product has gone through eight major versions and Reflect X is the latest, providing the CoPilot+ support as well as a general 2x speed increase on v8. 

Dave Joyce, Macrium
Dave Joyce

Macrium CEO Dave Joyce stated: “With Reflect X, we’re not just updating our software; we’re resetting the industry standard for backup and recovery. In today’s market, where tighter regulations and economic pressures are squeezing businesses from all sides, the tolerance for downtime has hit an all-time low. What was considered acceptable even a few years ago simply doesn’t cut it anymore.”

Reflect X can restore an image up to 5x faster than Reflect 8 because it has multi-threading capabilities, better compression, and backup optimization. It can also resume interrupted backups. A Macrium blog says: “Our new resumable imaging feature uses checkpoint technology to ensure that even if a backup is interrupted, it can seamlessly continue from the last saved point … It reduces the risk of incomplete backups due to outages or reboots, uses resources efficiently by not restarting large backups from scratch, and improves overall reliability for backups in distributed or remote office scenarios.”

The Reflect X product also “introduces file filtering when creating a disk image, which provides users with options to exclude files from disk images. This ensures that only the necessary data is captured, reducing the storage requirements when creating images [and] images can be created and restored faster helping meet [recovery time object and recovery point objective] targets.”

Dave Joyce joined Macrium as COO in 2023, and took over as CEO from the company’s founder, Nick Sills, in September.

CoPilot+ PCs need so-called NPUs (neural processing units) supporting 40-plus TOPS (trillions of operations per second), a Microsoft Pluton security processor, a minimum 16 GB of DRAM and 256 GB storage, plus a CoPilot key and Windows 11 24H2 runtime software with its AI-focused CoPilot layer.

CoPilot+ PC
CoPilot+ PC

Macrium has offices in the UK, US (Denver), and Canada (Winnipeg), and sells its product direct and via OEM and ODM deals. Customers include Sysmex, General Motors, and Disney. Reflect X will be launched on October 8.