What is the best Hard Drive Image freeware?

[nepcrepair]

Hello all.

Can't for the life of me find (or remember) the hard drive image freeware I had
stored somewhere. I haven't had to use any in many years.

Well with the shop getting ready to open soon, I figured that I would copy the
freeware to the shop PC. Guess what? Can't find it on any of the many hard
drives I have laying around. And better yet, I don't even remember what I used
to use.

So, what is everyone using nowadays? Or should I say, what would be the best
freeware to use for creating hard drive images so I can backup/clone a hard
drive?

Please let me know. And if you have the time, please tell me why you chose
it over others.

Thanks for any help

 

[TopLevelComp]

I know of a few..

DriveImage XML
CloneZilla
HD Clone
Ranish Partition Manager

 

[loaner]

i use drive image myself.

..goss

 

[16k_zx81]

Paragon Free is my personal fav

 

[ATTech]

Keep in mind, out of the aforementioned software, Clonezilla and Ranish are the only ones who allow free commercial use.

 

[Martyn]

I paid and use Acronis

 

[Crgky127]

I use Clonezilla most of the time because it's free and it works. DriveImage XML is nice, but the hot imaging isn't worth $5 to $20 per use to me.

 

[silvano]

I've been playing with Macrium reflect free. I really like it, so far.

 

[freythman]

I've had some good experience with PING

 

[kwisher]

I recommend Clonezilla for a free simple solution. The Trinity Rescue Disk has a drive imaging application on it but I have not used it. If you want to get really geeky you can install your favorite Linux distro on a spare machine with a lot of storage and use the free OpenSource project called FOG.

 

[kmeyntz]

EASEUS disc copy makes a really good hard drive cloning software that's free, it does a sector by sector clone.

http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/

 

[nepcrepair]

Seems like Clonezilla is a favorite here.

Question: Does Clonezilla copy the entire drive sector by sector, or does
it just copy used sectors? Also, can it do both?

 

[Styxbound]

+ for macrium. Easy for a simple mind like mine to use.

 

[Inquixative]

EASEUS TODO + 2
And nobody knows about it!

 

[Vicenarian]

Seems like Clonezilla is a favorite here.

Question: Does Clonezilla copy the entire drive sector by sector, or does
it just copy used sectors? Also, can it do both?

It just copies used sectors for the filesystems it supports. For all unsupported filesystems, it does a sector by sector copy using dd.

It can also clone disks with bad sectors by going to the advanced mode, and selecting the -rescue switch. It will then skip bad sectors.

 

[gazza]

Have you tried Redobackup? it's free

http://redobackup.org/

 

[nepcrepair]

Have you tried Redobackup? it's free

http://redobackup.org/

Look very interesting. I think I'll download it and play with it a bit.
I guess that I will also end up trying a few of the suggestions here.

Thanks

 

[ljtechservices]

Seems like Clonezilla is a favorite here.

i've had really good success using clonezilla.

one annoying limitation of clonezilla is you cannot restore to a smaller drive/partition.
another one is the filesystem must be clean. if the dirty bit is set on a NTFS partition errors may occur. (as of my last use. don't know if this has been fixed yet.)

 

[minc3d]

Ive been beating my brain on this issue for too long. I dont know why I havent asked this before myself.

Anyone know out of the recommended software, besides Acronis, which do the following:

1) Allow for the use of a boot cd directly off the host to do an image to a network share.
2) Allow you to browse images without restoring them, and pluck individual files out of the image.

Acronis does this well but is of couse paid software on each upgrade and I don't want to keep paying the upgrade fee.

Any ideas?

 

[Martyn]

Ive been beating my brain on this issue for too long. I dont know why I havent asked this before myself.

Anyone know out of the recommended software, besides Acronis, which do the following:

1) Allow for the use of a boot cd directly off the host to do an image to a network share.
2) Allow you to browse images without restoring them, and pluck individual files out of the image.

Acronis does this well but is of couse paid software on each upgrade and I don't want to keep paying the upgrade fee.

Any ideas?

Acronis says it is licenced for one machine and all drives I clone are attached to that machine in my workshop so as far as I am concerned I'm ok