Images are stored in XML files, so you can access them from any supporting third-party software.
With DriveImage XML you can create "hot" images from a hard disk already in use.
DriveImage XMLĭriveImage XML uses Microsoft VSS to create images and does so with the reliability you might not expect in a free tool. The Macrium free edition is also capable of creating differential images, do direct-disk cloning, boot backups into a Hyper-V virtual machine, run scheduled backups, do bare-metal restores and can even encrypt backups. This software does disk imaging and disk cloning, allows you to access images from the file manager, creates a Linux rescue CD, and is compatible with Windows. This hard drive cloning software supports only Windows file systems, but it does it quite well and has a fairly straightforward user interface. Macrium Reflect Free Edition touts itself as one of the fastest disk cloning utilities available. Clonezilla does use a curses-based interface, so some might find it a bit challenging at first. And if you're looking to clone multiple machines quickly, Clonezilla SE can clone 40 machines at once. Clonezilla might be the single most powerful disk copy tool available that doesn't have a price tag. There's an unattended mode and multicast support built-in, as well as the ability to reinstall the Grub bootloader. This particular take on the cloning process is more like a bootable Linux distribution that can do bit-by-bit copying, and it supports a ton of file systems (including FAT32, NTFS, HFS+, UFS, NetBSD, OpenBSD, xfs, jfs, btrfs, f2fs, nilfs2 and even LVM2). ClonezillaĬlonezilla is one of my favorite HDD cloning tools. SEE: Software usage policy (TechRepublic Premium) 1. In the end, what's important is that you use the tool that best suits your skills and needs. Some are Windows specific and others don't care what operating system you're running. While some will do a-bit-for-bit copy, others create a full ISO image of your running system. Some of these hard drive cloning apps are more powerful than others. When you don't have the budget, what do you do? You a disk imaging utility listed here, all of which do an admirable job of cloning a hard disk drive at an unbeatable ee. Unfortunately, retail hard disk imaging software, like Acronis Backup and Restore, may not be in everyone's budget. When this occurs, if you happen to have a backup image or clone of the damaged or corrupt source drive, recovering your data to a new drive will be far easier. You'll have an old hard drive fail and either you'll lose valuable data or the machine will refuse to boot.
It's inevitable: At some point you're going to need to recover from a disaster.