Reliable, quick and easy drive image

mrapoc

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I've given this topic a search but i have failed to find up to date recommendations on a solid tool for making images of drives prior to doing any risky work. I hope this will give me a solid edge over the competition by claiming that their data is safe with me.

I'd hate to make a clone that took ages to complete (creating a backlog) or once created was useless. I suppose it would also have to cope with failing drives and also be compatible with everything.

I'm also one of those people who prefer a GUI for ease of use :eek:

Any recommendations? I suppose a bootcd would be the best way to go about it - imaging to a usb drive. Once an image has been made, if going onto a new hard drive, it would be much better to clone an image onto the new drive rather than thrashing a failing drive repeatedly (if the clone fails) so I think making an image is win-win
 
I did but there wasn't that much conclusive stuff. Cheers for the link, I'll check it out.

Are they all generally good as there doesn't seem to be a firm favourite
 
Backupper looks awesome. That thread answered my needs perfectly. Have a thanks!

Wow, just had a look at their site. Will definitely be looking at this for some situations. I was wondering how they are making any money but I see they do a paid product for managing partitions.
Good ol China.

We primarily use Acronis boot CDs to image machines to USB or NAS at the moment and probably won't be changing that anytime soon. We are also Macrium resellers and users.
 
I have used DriveImageXML successfully for a while; prob a couple years.

First, and I normally hate people who do this, but this is probably one of the most popular topics on this forum and there are literally hundreds of threads on it, so you really should search - I don't mean that in any snarky way either. :)

That being said, a critical piece of information to keep in mind is to thoroughly test whatever solution you settle on, and do not experiement with clients data!!!

There's a story here of a tech who had never used DriveImageXML before, the first time he ever used it was to backup a clients machine. Unbeknownst to him there was some sort of error along the way and the image was NOT successful, and he lost the clients data.

This was 100% preventable, USER error on behalf of the tech.

So test any backup / cloning method on a couple expendable machines FIRST before deploying it for client use. :)
 
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For healthy hard drives, I have used Drive Snapshot for years. It works within Windows. it's portable, fast, good compression, the image is mountable to access individual files, and I have never had a restoration fail, which I can't say about Acronis.

I think I first found it on Hirens years ago, but I now have a legal copy that I use almost daily.
 
I'm liking the look of AOMEI backupper. Am I reading right Standard Edition is free for techs to use? Looks like you can do file backup, folder backup, do by partition or disk even, and do imaging with it, and it seems to even have a scheduling feature. Might have to play with that program when I get time.
 
I'm liking the look of AOMEI backupper. Am I reading right Standard Edition is free for techs to use? Looks like you can do file backup, folder backup, do by partition or disk even, and do imaging with it, and it seems to even have a scheduling feature. Might have to play with that program when I get time.

I believe so, according to their license information page: http://www.backup-utility.com/license.html
 
The new Parted Magic disk has a gui for gddrescue. If you use gddrescue then you know you have 100% of everything on that drive. You don't unnecessarily damage a drive that you don't know is failing. And it is a full read test of the drive.
 
I have yet to try the gui version off ddrescue. Couldn't find any tutorials on how to use it?

Anyone had any success? Is it easy to use?


Regards,
 
A guide for the gui? It is simple. Choose source, destination, logfile location. I think it gives the retry option, but I don't bother with retries. Last I saw there was no reverse, which is very important for data recovery.
 
Redo Backup is an open source imaging utility that looks pretty interesting. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks real easy to use & the reviews seem pretty good. It's free for commercial use also.

http://redobackup.org/
 
Tekguy said:
Redo Backup is an open source imaging utility that looks pretty interesting. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks real easy to use & the reviews seem pretty good. It's free for commercial use also.

http://redobackup.org/

I used to use Acronis, but about 2-3 versions ago it got buggy and bloated. These days I use redo. I have it on a multi-boot 16 gig flash drive. Great UI and works well.


brandonkick said:
Not a single vote for CloneZilla?

Works well enough but the UI sucks worse than D7...lol
 
Awesome response. Backupper and the latest parted magic are on my shortlist. The rest I'll check out at some point.
 
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