While I certainly like the idea of "free", there's one thing that I'm not sure of with all the tools mentioned... The article title refers to "cloning". That, to me, suggests that, if my internal hard drive crashes, I could take the "cloned" disk, (USB drive, etc.) replace my fried drive with it, boot up and continue working as if the original drive were still in place. Some of these products refer to storing backups in XML format, so that's obviously not a cloned drive. I'd really like to see a differentiation between a true, usable, bootable cloned disk, and a backup, which requires a new drive and a bare-metal restore from it.

I've used products (Acronis True Image, for one) that will copy a drive bit-for-bit and enlarge or shrink the partition on the new drive, as long as all the data will fit on the new partition. I've gone from a 250GB drive to a 500GB drive as well as the reverse. The new drive takes over as the boot drive and life goes on. I believe I've also used CloneZilla to do that, but the writeup on Redo doesn't give that assurance. Will all/some/any of these products do that? I wish the article would have been more specific.

Thanks also to Palmetto_CharlieSpencer for his tip on putting a cloned drive on new hardware. I may have thought of that on my own (eventually), but it was a great "reminder" to see it in print.