Just wondering what the best solutions out there are for saving entire images of disks. I’m not looking to clone disks, I’m looking to save them so that I can load them back onto drives at my choosing. I’ve used EaseUSToDoBackup Free, which has been an “okay” solution, but I’m wondering what other options are available and which are highly recommended/the best.
Also, I’m not looking for half ass solutions that would only save just selective few partitions. The solution needs to save the entire drive.
In order to backup my C:\drive I always use the standard Windows 7 Backup Create System Image.
When my system has crashed and burned and is unrecoverable, I find that it’s the only way to restore the old OS by using the Windows Repair Disk / CD.
The only bad thing is the first time you use it, Windows System Image may want to backup multiple drives in your system, making a gigantic image file. I did a lot of searching to find a way to fix this. The easiest way is to just unplug those other drives temporarily. The next time you backup, it won’t try to put the other drives on it.
I personally have used Paragon products and have always found them easy to use but powerful. Granted I haven’t tried any of their free products, but for basic image-based backup it should do the trick. Their Hard Disk Manager has been very useful in my day to day IT work if you decide you need a more complete toolkit. I’ll link to the free backup version below if you want to check it out.
If you need something with a little more infrastructure, like deploying work stations, there’s Windows Deployment Services if you want a heavily managed infrastructure, or Clonedeploy if you want something flexible.
Clonezilla is excellent as well. It really depends on what you are doing. If you just want to make images of disks for full restore down the line and aren’t concerned about file level recovery or a daily backup solution, then clonezilla on a bootable USB is great. Also note that the last time I used the software (several years ago at this point), this was the only way to use it (besides burning a live CD). Not sure if this is still the case. Worked great when getting images of client computers.
While Clonezilla is pretty good, it’s just a collection of tools. I’d suggest getting familiar with dd, ntfsclone, partimage, etc.
Heres some info on mounting dd images:
Back in the old days, I used to use a lot of Norton/Symantec Ghost. I don’t know what the current state of the program is, but it was pretty good, and would also allow you to mount ghost files.
Fallen asked if it did block to block transfer, which is starting from one end and continuing to the end, copying each block over, regardless of whether there is any actual useful data there or not. With this you retain the structure, and you, or rather the process, have a relatively small chance of fucking things up (unless you migrate the data to a smaller device, then you are in trouble). The other programs I mentioned tries to ascertain whether the data in the block is actual data or just an empty cell. If it thinks there is useful data it’ll copy, if not, it will not, simple as that. However, this can confuse for instance Windows OS (if that is what you are trying to make a backup of), which will boot up on the new device and has to figure out where everting is located again. However I think all new operating systems is quite well equipped for this.
Edit: just a typo. Also I should mention this is somewhat a laymans explanation (and understanding). Maybe someone more knowledgable can chime in.
Clonezilla will copy regardless whether it’s an empty cell or not, right? I need to make sure I’m not losing anything. I don’t care if the cell is empty, I need it to copy over exactly everything.
No it will not, only if it is an unsupported filesystem, and chances are your is very much supported, in which case it will default to a transfer method which is not block to block. It’s been a while since I used Clonezilla, but you might be able to select a specific program/method of cloning. In which case you can select a program called dd, yes, just that, “dd”, which will do block to block.
Or, if you are not afraid of a bare terminal window, you can use dd with pretty much any linux live USB.
