Best hard disk imaging software preferable free

MrBlobby

MrBlobby

MrBlobby

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What's the best hard disk imaging software preferably free ?

Macrium Reflect is pretty good. Is it possible to copy a whole hard disk including partitions ?

The only trouble with Macrium reflect is you have to pay for incremental back ups.
 
Offline you're probably looking at Clonezilla. Online with fancy features will be the built in Windows backup if you're using Vista/W7.

Beyond that there are paid for products like Ghost and Acronis. Acronis is popular on here.
 
I use Macrium Reflect and at only 20 quid it is a steal. Very easy to use. I find it more flexible than the Windows 7 backup in many respects - for example I can set up several backup jobs for different folders/partitions and deal with them separately - rather than all collectively as in Windows Backup.

There is a free 30 day trial. Worth a look if Clonezilla is not to your liking.
 
Best or free? Two different things :P

The best = Norton (Symantec) Ghost... without a doubt... especially when you get in to the likes of ghost casting etc... but even for backing up whole drives/partitions - it's brilliant... used it a lot and never had a duff image

Heard good things about Acronis - but I prefer ghost

Clonezilla is free & pretty good - but I haven't had any extended use of it
 
dd | gzip will do anything you could possibly want to do with disk imaging, costs nothing whatsoever. I make heavy use of this and it's shown no signs of letting me down yet.
 
A while back there was a way of getting Acronis free with a code can not remember all the info but was legit i picked it up at the time i think it went something like this > you buyed the add on for free with a code they gave out and when you looked at your entitled downloads the recovery disk was available which of course has the full program on the disk.
 
MrBlobby said:
Where can I download this ?
Click to expand...

To expand on osc89er's response,

dd is a unix command which copies data literally, down at the byte level. It's about as simple an imaging tool as you could hope for. It's run from the command line, and will take a couple of minutes of reading the manual to work out what options you want to use.

| is a pipe, it'll take the output of dd and feed it into whatever comes after it.

gzip is a convenient compression tool. Likewise checking the manual is a good idea.

Ubuntu's livecd or knoppix are probably the most friendly options if you don't have a copy of linux or bsd installed.
 
SiriusB said:
I use Macrium Reflect and at only 20 quid it is a steal. Very easy to use. I find it more flexible than the Windows 7 backup in many respects - for example I can set up several backup jobs for different folders/partitions and deal with them separately - rather than all collectively as in Windows Backup.

There is a free 30 day trial. Worth a look if Clonezilla is not to your liking.
Click to expand...

+1 Macrium Reflect, simple and works great!.
 
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