CPUs for roughly a decade now have had hardware acceleration for AES encryption/decryption operations, so there's little to no performance penalty for enabling it, but even if there were, that consideration should pale in comparison to the risk of losing sensitive data, especially for backups involving other people's sensitive data.
#Macrium reflect trial reset password#
A backup that has a password but no encryption imparts a false sense of security to the user, which can be very dangerous, and I can't think of a single use case in 2018 for having a password but no encryption. That's why you should absolutely use AES encryption, in fact I have a Wish List thread asking encryption to be made the default and for the “no encryption” option to be removed, or at least come with a warning if it has to be kept for compatibility. Theoretically, the Reflect application could even be hacked to simply skip the password prompt and allow access to the data in this scenario. If you have a password and don’t use encryption, then the data is still stored in the clear, so it would be accessible to anyone who parsed the Reflect file. Thanks for any light you might be able to shed. This has just become much more relevant in the UK/Europe in view of GDPR! Perhaps there is a formal Macrium document explaining all of this, but I can't find one - I'll be delighted to read one of it exists. If a password-protected image were to go astray (get lost, stolen etc!) and fall into the hands of someone who undertood the contents to be a Macrium Reflect image, is the data useless to them without the key used for password protection? Does the key simply unlock the image container or is the data itself encrypted as the data is written to the backup image file? How long should the password be? Should I really be using AES encryption? Is there a penalty to pay in terms of backup creation time? Yep, so many questions -) I'd like to know how secure this makes backed-up images, especially when taking images off-site. I've checked current documentation and searched the forum, but can't find much in-depth background on this feature. The 'AdvancedSettings' area allows me to protect backup images.