What is the issue?
Recently we released a significant update to Macrium Reflect. This update went through rigorous internal testing on a variety of platforms and was not released until it passed all of our tests.
Unfortunately upon release a number of our users have been reporting issues with either being unable to update Reflect, due to the installer not running/completing successfully, or upon successfully installing they have been unable to start Reflect with either no response or the program hanging at startup.
What is causing this?
After corresponding with our customers to diagnose the issues we have found the cause to be a number of security products interfering with the operation of the updated version of Reflect.
Please be assured this is a false positive identification issue, if you wish to verify your Reflect installation you can follow the instructions found here (Confirming that Macrium download is genuine).
A list of security products that have so far been identified as causing this issue: Avast Anti-Virus, Emsisoft Anti-Malware, MalwareBytes Anti-Malware.
Note this is a list of software products that our customers have reported as causing this issue but any security software could potentially cause these issues.
What do we mean by 'security software'?
Here we are using security software to refer to a broad category of software that are commonly referred to as either Anti-Virus, Anti-Malware, Anti-Spyware or Internet Security software. These terms are all very loosely defined and it is common to see them used interchangeably in the marketing & documentation of these types of software. The issues described in this article can be caused by any software that attempts to "protect" your computer by interfering with the operation of other software.
What can you do to fix the problem?
Firstly you may wish to check that this issue is being caused by security software.
The most reliable way to do this is either:
- Completely uninstalling your AV software and performing a reboot (After diagnosing the issue you may re-install your security software, however this will likely bring back the conflicts. See below for the solution).
- Performing a windows clean boot.
To fix this issue you can should be able to add Reflect to your security software's list of safe programs (often referred to as a "whitelist" or "exceptions list").
It is also highly recommended you report this issue to the software vendor so that they can update their databases to correctly identify the new version of Reflect as safe software to hopefully prevent this issue occurring for future updates.