For Macrium Reflect users

Your Macrium images still work.
Keep them free.

Macrium Reflect Free is discontinued. OPBS is a free, open-source Windows imaging tool that reads, browses, mounts and restores your existing .mrimg and .mrimgx images — including differential and incremental chains. No subscription, no account, no removal date.

⬇ Download OPBS How to migrate

What happened to Macrium Reflect Free?

The images on your disk never expired — only the free tool that read them did.

Nothing is wrong with your old backups. A .mrimg or .mrimgx file is just a file — it doesn't phone home or stop working. What you lost was a free way to open it again. That's the gap OPBS fills.

OPBS reads the images you already have

Both containers, both chain styles, from the GUI, the CLI and the Config Builder.

💿 Reflect 7 / 8 .mrimg

A clean-room decoder for Macrium's QuickLZ 1.31 container, validated against the per-block MD5s stored inside the image itself. Full, differential and incremental backups all open.

💽 Reflect X .mrimgx

Parsed from the official layout — footer, metadata, $INDEX zstd blocks — validated against the official Macrium demo image. mrimg info reports disk geometry and backup type.

🔗 Differential & incremental chains

Open any member and OPBS resolves its base automatically: v7/8 chains via the <id>-<inc>-<inc>.mrimg naming, Reflect X delta sets via the backup-set manifest. You always see and restore the full logical volume state.

🔍 Browse & extract files

Pull a single file out of a decade-old Macrium image without restoring a whole disk. NTFS sparse runs, LZNT1 compression, alternate data streams — the works.

💾 Mount read-only

Attach a partition from a Macrium image as a real drive letter via WinFsp, with zero extra disk usage — reads are served on demand by decompressing only the needed blocks.

🛠 Restore full disks

Placement is read from the image's own geometry and partition table. Every block is decompressed and MD5-verified before it lands on the target. Works from the restore wizard, the CLI and the Config Builder.

Validated on real images. The Macrium reader is covered by a real-sample test suite (Reflect 8 .mrimg and Reflect X .mrimgx images, plus the official Macrium demo) that checks block-level decode against stored MD5s — and skips cleanly when no samples are present, so the suite stays honest.
And it's fast. Measured on real images: 152–210 MB/s reading Reflect X and 167 MB/s on a 1.25 GB Reflect 7/8 disk image — with every block MD5-verified against Macrium's own digests. See the benchmark and reproduce it ↗
Refused up front, never mid-restore: password-protected images, split multi-part sets, and file-and-folder (File Backup) images are not supported. OPBS detects them from the file contents and refuses with a clear message before touching the disk, instead of failing halfway through with a confusing parse error.

Migrate in three steps

  1. Install OPBS

    Free, GPL-3.0, Windows 10 / 11. No account, no phone-home, no nags. The installer and a portable exe are on the releases page.

  2. Point it at your Macrium images

    In the restore wizard, just pick the .mrimg / .mrimgx file — the pickers list them alongside native .opbs images. Prefer the command line? 

    OPBS.exe --cli mrimg info "D:\Images\win11-00-00.mrimg"
OPBS.exe --cli browse "D:\Images\win11-01-01.mrimg" --partition 2

  3. Restore, mount, or extract

    Full-disk restore to any target, a read-only WinFsp mount to pull single files, or a targeted extract — your old backups become ordinary, usable files again. 

    OPBS.exe --cli extract "D:\Images\win11-00-00.mrimg" --partition 1 --path "Users\me\notes.txt" --out D:\restored\notes.txt
Then take new backups with OPBS. New backups use the open .opbs format — encrypted incremental chains, scheduled restore drills, bit-rot scrubbing — but keep your Macrium images around as long as you like: OPBS will still restore them. How OPBS proves restores work ↗

Free means free — and provable

OPBS doesn't just replace the Reflect Free you lost. It includes integrity features that even most paid tools charge for.

🪂 Scheduled restore drills

OPBS periodically restores your newest backup onto a scratch disk you dedicate and validates the result — including encrypted images. A backup you've never restored is a hope, not a plan.

🧩 Bit-rot scrubbing & self-healing

Every backup gets an XOR-parity sidecar. A scheduled or idle scrub re-reads every block and rebuilds any single corrupted block in place — silently fixing rot before it becomes a failed restore.

🔒 Immutable repositories

Append-only repositories with an HMAC-chained journal and optional off-box anchor that detects rollback — plus S3 Object Lock WORM support. Ransomware that finds your NAS still can't rewrite your history.

🔓 No strings attached

GPL-3.0, open source, no subscription, no account, no telemetry, no "free" tier that expires. Read the code, build it yourself, or just use the installer.

Honest limits

A quick word on what OPBS is not — because a backup tool that oversells itself is worse than one that doesn't.

Get OPBS

Free · GPL-3.0 · Windows 10 / 11 · Restores Macrium 7/8/X images

⬇ Installer (.exe) Portable (.exe) All features