Hi guys, I’m looking for some recommendations for (and advice about) a decent disk cloning tool to use. The thing is, it has to be free – I can’t afford to use a commercial solution unfortunately. I’ve heard good things about Clonezilla. Anyone have any experience with this? Basically all I want to do is clone the system reserved and C: partitions of a Windows 7 install on a laptop hard drive so, when things inevitably go downhill in the future, I can just deploy the image to the drive for a clean start without too much messing about. I assume this is possible? I’ve not had any experience in the past with disk cloning though. What happens with regard to the MBR etc? Will that be cloned (and subsequently restored) too? I’m also under the impression that any unused space on the drive is heavily compressed to make the image as small as possible. So, say, cloning a 100Gb partition with only 20Gb used and the rest free space wouldn’t actually weigh in all that much more than 20Gb? Is that right – or is it literally a bit-for-bit thing? There is one more caveat – the only external drive I have with space enough to store the image is formatted to Ext3. So whatever tool I use would have to support reading from and writing to Ext3. There’s too much important data on that drive to reformat it to NTFS unfortunately. It’s a WD MyBook 500Gb USB 2.0 drive if that matters. Thanks in advance.
This one: http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm I've tried it fairly successfully in the past
Cool I'll check it out. Will that be able to back the image up to an Ext3 formatted drive though? Sent from my HTC Desire using Tapatalk
I've heard good things about clonezilla, but it's never worked for me. And it's not because I don't know what I'm doing. It's been hardware problems. I haven't needed to use it though, so never dug any deeper.
If you can see it from Windows then it probably will be able to back up the image to it. I don't know for sure as I've never tried it
