EASEUS Disk Copy
Copy and clone your hard drive


EASEUS Disk Copy is a potent freeware providing sector-by-sector disk/partition copy regardless of your operating system, file systems and partition scheme. The sector-by-sector method assures you a copy 100% identity to the original. Disk Copy can be used for copy, cloning, or upgrading your original small hard drive to a new larger drive. Simply speaking, it can copy anything from the old hard drive including the deleted, lost files and inaccessible data.

Major Features
Copy all of your hard drive
Partition copy
Sector by sector copy
Safe, simple and fast

More Features
Supports IDE, SATAI, SATAII, SCSI, Firewire(IEEE1394) and USB drives
Supports Dynamic Disk
Supports inaccessible disk copy
Supports booting from CD/DVD
Friendly graphical user interface
Relay disk space for insufficient destination.

Last Updated 21 September 2010
Win XP/Vista/7

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition
Image backup tool

A complete disaster recovery solution for your home and office. Protect your personal documents, photos, music and emails. Upgrade your hard disk or try new operating systems in the safe knowledge that everything is securely saved in an easily recovered backup file.

Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS).
Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.
Built in scheduler.
32 bit and native 64 bit versions.
Industry leading compression levels and speed.
Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size!
Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista.
HTML log files.

Last Updated 28 January 2012
Win XP/Vista/7

DriveImage XML
Image backup tool

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Image creation uses Microsoft's Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe "hot images" even from drives currently in use. Images are stored in XML files, allowing you to process them with 3rd party tools. Never again be stuck with a useless backup! Restore images to drives without having to reboot. DriveImage XML is now faster than ever, offering two different compression levels.

Product Highlights
Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
Browse images, view and extract files
Restore images to the same or a different drive Copy directly from drive to drive
Schedule automatic backups
Run DriveImage from WinPE boot CD-ROM

Last Updated 13 January 2011
Win XP/2003/Vista/7

O&O DiskImage Express Edition
Quickly backup or restore your entire drive

Create an image of your data now and be protected against data loss:

Thanks to its intuitive user interface and innovative design, O&O DiskImage 4 Express makes creating data images as easy as pie.

Ever increasing amounts of vital personal data (letters, photos, emails, tax declarations) are currently being saved on computers. Having an image of such data is therefore extremely important. And to make sure that neither too high a price nor a too complicated product prevents you from protecting your data, we’ve developed this free O&O DiskImage Express Edition.

Image all your data, your installed programs, and your Windows operating system with absolutely no expense. You’ll be able to fall back on the imaged data whenever you want by mounting the image as a drive. It’s only in the event you need to restore your operating system partition (the part of the hard disk on which Microsoft Windows is installed) that you’ll ever need the O&O DiskImage Professional Edition.

Last Updated 16 April 2010
Win 2000/XP/2003/Vista/7

CHDClone Free
Make 1:1 copies of a hard disk

The Free Edition of HDClone clones an entire hard disk to another, larger medium. Use it for migrating an existing installation to a new hard disk or for rescuing data.

The Free Edition is real freeware without obligation to buy and is intended for the short-term usage at no cost.

Last Updated 27 December 2008
Win 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista

Clonezilla
Image backup tool

Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!

Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, partclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla SE was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting.
Win 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP/Vista
Mac
Linux

PING
Backup and restore whole partitions

PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment.

Several tools have been added and written, so to make this ISO the perfect choice to backup and restore whole partitions, an easy way. It sounds like Symantec Ghost(tm), but has even better features, and is totally free.

Features include:
Probably the best available Linux toolbox for rescuing a system;
Backup and Restore partitions or files locally or to the network (MS Network Shared directory, NFS, FTP or SSHFS);
Backup and Restore the BIOS data as well;
Either burn a bootable CD / DVD, either integrate within a PXE / RIS environment;
Possibility to Blank local admin's password;
Create your own restoration bootable DVD (see the Howto Documentation);
Partition and Format a disk before installing Windows (so to make sure your unattended Windows installation will happen on the right partition);

Specific advantages PING brings you over DOS and Ghost :
Most network cards automatically recognized by the Kernel (unlike DOS);
Most CD/DVD readers automatically recognized by the Kernel (unlike DOS);
You don't have to run a Ghostcast server to receive images over the network;
More supported filesystems;
You can store an image on several CD/DVD (CD/DVD-spanning);
You can backup and restore BIOS settings too;
Much much smaller than WinPE / BartPE; etc.

Last Updated 29 December 2008
Linux

Partimage
Backup and restore whole partitions

Partimage is a Linux utility which saves partitions having a supported filesystem to an image file. Most Linux and Windows filesystems are supported. The image file can be compressed with the gzip / bzip2 programs to save disk space, and they can be splitted into multiple files to be copied on CDs / DVDs, ... Partitions can also be saved across the network since version 0.6.0 using the partimage network support, or using Samba / NFS. If you don't want to install Partimage, you can download and burn SystemRescueCd. It's a livecd that allows to use Partimage immediately even if your computer has no operating system installed (useful to restore an image), and it allows to save an image on a DVD on the fly.

Partimage will only copy data from the used portions of the partition. For speed and efficiency, free blocks are not written to the image file. This is unlike the 'dd' command, which also copies empty blocks. Partimage also works for large, very full partitions. For example, a full 1 GB partition can be compressed with gzip down to 400MB.

This is very useful to save partitions to an image in some cases.

Last Updated 29 December 2008
Linux

FOG
A free computer cloning solution

Fog is a Linux-based, free and open source computer imaging solution for Windows XP and Vista that ties together a few open-source tools with a php-based web interface. Fog doesn't use any boot disks, or CDs; everything is done via TFTP and PXE. Also with fog many drivers are built into the kernel, so you don't really need to worry about drivers (unless there isn't a linux kernel module for it). Fog also supports putting an image that came from a computer with a 80GB partition onto a machine with a 40GB hard drive as long as the data is less than 40GB.

Fog also includes a graphical Windows service that is used to change the hostname of the PC, restart the computer if a task is created for it, and auto import hosts into the FOG database. The service also installs printers, and does simple snap-ins.

Last Updated 21 September 2009
Win XP/Vista/7