Best HardDrive Cloning Software (Free)

sketchpad

Hi guys , I'm looking for thoughts and suggestions of what you think is the best free hard drive imaging/cloning software. There are plenty of articles online but its hard to find independent reviews and most seem to be pushing their sponsor.

sketchpad

The purpose is for keeping a backup.

Lu Tze

sketchpad wrote: »

Hi guys , I'm looking for thoughts and suggestions of what you think is the best free hard drive imaging/cloning software. There are plenty of articles online but its hard to find independent reviews and most seem to be pushing their sponsor.

I've used clonezilla before, did the job, nothing fancy

Lu Tze

sketchpad wrote: »

Hi guys , I'm looking for thoughts and suggestions of what you think is the best free hard drive imaging/cloning software. There are plenty of articles online but its hard to find independent reviews and most seem to be pushing their sponsor.

I've used clonezilla before, did the job, nothing fancy

thomas anderson.

I use norton ghost at work and never had a problem with it

sketchpad

thomas anderson. wrote: »

I use norton ghost at work and never had a problem with it

Isn't that a paid software though? I need something free because I'm a scrooge

thomas anderson.

sketchpad wrote: »

Isn't that a paid software though? I need something free because I'm a scrooge

I think I may have gotten a 5 finger discount

Monotype

WD and Seagate offer free versions of Acronis for use with their hard drives.
http://support.wdc.com/product/downloaddetail.asp?swid=119
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/discwizard/

Darren 83

Maruim Reflect will do the job there is a free one but you cant do incremental or differential back up.

PropJoe10

Clonezilla is the business.

Mr. G

+1 for Clonezilla.

You could also try Macrium Reflect, hear it's good but haven't used it.

vibe666

I use acronis and have done for many years.

it's a paid app, but you get the full features in a free trial for 30 days and you can then use it to create a bootable usb stick (or CD) for cloning and backup/restore work that doesn't time out with the trial installation, so you can keep using it indefinitely.

ressem

If there is possible damage on the hard drive then the ddrescue program is my first choice, due to it's ability to
a) log the good sectors and bad sectors.
b) use this log to stop, modify and restart the job without losing progress
c) A lot of control over speed including ability to run the clone process backward over the disk platter which has produced improved results in the odd case.

Where DDrescue is a command line application, included on the live CDs (SystemRescue, scientificlinux, ubuntu rescue remix and others) and downloadable on most other linux distros.


http://www.paragon-software.com/home/rk-free/ is ok if a simple interface is wanted and free for home use. Handy to be able to create an image immediately usable for a virtual machine.

sketchpad

thanks for all the suggestions. Clonezilla seems to be popular. I have a WD Passport with a partition set up for my backup so first I shall try out Acronis' free WD application. If thats too clunky or requires a ton of background processes to be running constantly I'll take a look at Clonezilla (I can put it beside Filezilla in my toolbar )

sketchpad

Bummer!
Acronis wont clone to a partition on a drive with more than 1 partition.

ressem

sketchpad wrote: »

thanks for all the suggestions. Clonezilla seems to be popular. I have a WD Passport with a partition set up for my backup so first I shall try out Acronis' free WD application. If thats too clunky or requires a ton of background processes to be running constantly I'll take a look at Clonezilla (I can put it beside Filezilla in my toolbar )

No, clonezilla is a live linux CD, you'd have to boot into it separately.
There tends to be a number of partitions on modern windows installs that a program running within windows tend not to touch.

In acronis are you cloning to the destination drive (in which case there should be no partitions / everything erasable on the destination) or creating a disk image file?

In windows 7 and 8.1 you have the system image backup included.