Whether or not there are simpler tools for ad-hoc imaging, I don't know. The only thing you can't do in the reference image is joining the domain, as deployment will always start the machine in a workgroup. You can do all of your customization when creating your reference image, or in the deployment task schedule. Now, when you boot into your MDT boot image, if network drivers work (which they almost always do in Windows 10 and up), you can pick your task sequence and it will deploy your image. You can burn the ISO to a USB and use that, or add the WIM to a PXE server such as WDS or iPXE. You're given a boot image as a WIM and ISO. I'm at least not going to argue against you here. Personally I wanted the encrypt option that isn't in the free version, so I didn't mind paying for it and the other features.I'm assuming that the customer has a use case that actually requires a reference image and not just the Microsoft media. I heard all kinds of good things about Macrium but I never installed the free version before and was thinking of trying it today but saw there was a sale so I just bought the Home version outright. It's also subscription but they do offer a classic perpetual license to older acronis users, still not having the option to not install the anti virus/malware was a deal breaker. I wanted something closer to my old Acronis True Image Home, but I hate the new Acronis True Image as it is bundled with some kind of really bad antivirus/antimalware and it can't be disabled completely from what I read on Acronis' forum without turning off various services manually that cripple some of the backup program features lol. 2 PC installs with 1 possible transfer allowed then you have to buy a new license, if I understand it correctly. A 'lifetime' was $22 today but I didn't like the restrictions. I was thinking of AOMEI Backupper Pro since a 1 year license was free today but it's 1 year then it stops working. I was using Paragon partition manager backup w/ incremental as my backup solution but I wanted something newer.

How to use macrium reflect reddit