Discussion on:

Five free and reliable cloning tools

While Clonezilla is an excellent program it appears it will not support moving from a larger drive to a smaller drive even if there's more than enough room for the data on the smaller drive. This is something people moving to SSDs should be aware. Macrium's Reflect will allow this type of move and offers different methods of re-sizing the partitions to fit on the new storage device.

Do any of these work for server OS?

I'd like to know which of the aforementioned tools are compatible with Server 2003 and newer, too. It looked like only one of them included Server 2003 in this article.

Server support is more a limitation of hardware driver availiblity. Does it boot up and allow access to the usual raid controller in use. As for 2003 my experience is that most tools that work for xp and vista, work fine restoring 2003/2008, if they can boot. Many of the live cloning tools require you to reinstall the OS then restore the system. (but it works)
In actuality, I find backing up the data only, and having notes etc to reinstall OS/services is actually faster than restoring a system, plus being fresh fixes ghosts in the system.
Also other than clonezilla, all of these are backup and restore programs are not designed to distribute/clone an image for system builders.
I am a fan of FOG (Free and Open Ghost) it requires a dedicated server, time, heartache, and trial and error; but it works. Just remember that none of the imaging/backup solutions that are avalible today are 100% and all of them have troubles with drivers on newer systems. (Bane of our existance)

I like CloneZilla because it provides a lot features (similar to Norton Ghost). There is a only one thing I don't like of CZ, and it poor user interface. For computer enthusiasts it is not a problem, but for naive user.

Thanks for this post.

I think the most powerful and easy-to-use cloning tool is Norton Ghost.
It works under Windows and native DOS, does not require installation, weighs only 1.5Mb and allows copying/cloning disks and partitions. Supports cloning over network. Also Ghost images could be easily explored and even modified by GhostExplorer. I'm using it about 10 years and it is still the best tool on the market, in my opinion.

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After using CloneZilla for some time I have been converted to a full time Redo fan.

http://redobackup.org/

It is CloneZilla with a very simple GUI (two buttons), and everything I could do with CloneZilla I can do with Redo.

I was surprised it was not in the list as TechRepublic did a nice review of it:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/doityourself-it-guy/diy-get-reliable-disaster-recovery-for-free/424

I missed that one and will definately check it out.

Sorry, this is more a question than a comment. How does native Windows 7 ability to create a system image compare with these tools?

They work, but are not user friendly. There is no one place to go when you have problems with it other than MS support, which is great, but expensive. They are essentially two products. MS Backup and Restore, and Windows Imaging.
MS backup for windows works, but a nightmare if the situation is, WS died, and was replaced, XP to Win7. Guess what, You can't restore the backup, they are different versions. I had to make an XP VM to restore with.
Windows Imaging works well, but is designed for system builders, not end users. And by system builders I mean MS certified robots who get paid 7 figure incomes to pay for the upkeep of their training. I had to use their tools and learned a lot from it. Like using sysprep, and building driver neutral systems to deploy, and even a bit of why MS does what they do. (Scary) The tools are Wildly powerful, but not by any means easy to use.

Just got a comment deleted for some reason - perhaps because it included urls. Anyway, there is a version of NTbackup that you can use on vista/2008 and one for win7/2008R2. Just search on ntbackup for windows 7. You can download them from MSFT and very probably other sites. They will restore .bkf files from disk, but on 7 and 2008R2 not from tape.

You may get an error message when installing on win7. Just click through and continue the install.

I've successfully used Partition Wizard to clone HDD partitions. Very stable, fast and simple to use for partition copy. There is also a lot of other disk management tools included but some require disk technology knowledge.

Personal Edition is free for non commercial use and there are several paid versions for commercial use. Recommended.

Do any of these free programs support restoring to different hardware? I've been using the paid version of a popular backup software that has universal restore but have never really been completely satisfied with it. For something that is up to version 11 it still seems to have too many bugs / issues.

Put the image on the new drive. After the imaging process finishes, do NOT allow the system to reboot. Insert a Windows CD / DVD and boot from it instead of the hard drive. Run the install with the 'Repair' option. This will update the drivers while leaving data and programs intact. This will get you at least to the point where the video and NIC work.

Obviously, this is too cumbersome to recommend doing it on a regular basis. Still, I've been successful with it on those occasions where you absolutely have to put an image on different hardware.

As you stated: that works in a pinch, but has many issues with it, especailly in AD environments and with some drivers. Collegue "imaged" an entire classroom that way. It worked, but had strange "Ghosts", and N-Vidia vs ATI driver issues.

As with any non-SysPrep imaging, you've got to watch the system names and AD accounts. I reserve it for when those cases when you abso-tively, posi-lutely MUST put one image on one different system. I certainly wouldn't use it across mass systems.

Incidentally, if one is doing this in conjunction with upgrading an OS, upgrade the original system as far as possible before imaging. The newer OS is more likely to have drivers for the receiving machine.

You can prepare an image on one type of hardware and use sysprep to get the machine to generate from scratch a set of drivers, there are also some more benefits too such as sorting SIDS out etc. Ms provide a nice set of tools to develop images for situations such as classroom images. I am just finishing my summer project doing this type of thing for multiple machine types and 100+ pieces of software. Google waik and lite touch for some info. We used to use Ghost but have just moved to this system. FYI you can only sysprep Vista/7 based images 3 times so it is worth storing an unsyspreped version of the image too!

If you mean Acronis why don't you say so?
And I concur, It's an absolute pile of poo. I struggled with it for days thinking it would be the easiest way to recover SBS2008 but then gave up and used my backup backup which was the built in Windows backup. It was amazing, I started the restore and went home, eight hours later the server sent me an email - it was up and running perfectly!

I have been using the free version of EaseUS Todo Backup for some years now and has it has never failed. I use it for system backups and cloning drives. It is easy to use and has an excellent online help files.

I suspect you might have meant "cursor-based", but the term is sometimes appropriate! This interface is particularly challenging for Millennial users, since they have been trained by Vista/Win7 UAC to just click dialog boxes without reading them.

Nope, I'm pretty sure he meant curses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curses_%28programming_library%29

They used ncurses for Clonezilla; that allows it work well from a local or remote text console.

Do any of them support writing drives that aren't locally connected?

Bump plus related follow-up question:

1) Do any of these tools write to NAS?
2) Can any such NAS-capable tools run in incremental-mode so that incremental changes to an image can be applied overnight?

We use R-Drive Image at my work, which can get an IP Via DHCP and write to a network drive. Only costs about $29 USD (Yes, I know this is about free tools, but it's worth mentioning if you can't find anything else). Also takes images on the fly (which is old news by now, but I still think is pretty nifty.)

I have a 1TB drive in my computer dedicated to backups, mine, Purple's, and our daughter's computers backup each night to it.
I made 3 shared folders on the "backup" drive and made a "base" backup of each system, then schedule a differential backup for Sunday through Saturday for each(it only gives me 7 days of "recent" backups, otherwise I have to go back to the orginal "base" backup). With a larger drive I could do weekly & monthly backups (what I really should be doing).
The 3 computers are all Windows 7, 64 bit on a windows home network.

Is it aready safe to replace Windows 7 by Windows 8 for home users?

Thank you

Nice article, Jack.

SystemRescueCd is worth looking into. I think you've reported on it in the past.

http://www.sysresccd.org

I see above someone asked the question regarding cloning a server. Several years ago I used Clonezilla to upgrade our Dell SQL 2005 server on Server 2008, from a 75GB RAID 1 array to a 146GB RAID 1 array. As Clonezilla is a bit by bit copy it did not care about what was on the disk. As previously mentioned you cannot go to a smaller drive. To do this (after a full SQL system BU) I cloned the original RAID 1 system off to an external USB connected 146GB single drive. This took about 5 hrs 2 years ago, (the newest version of Clonezilla is faster). Then I brought down the server, pulled and labeled the drives from the old array as they were my Emergency Back Out plan. I installed the new drives, configured them for RAID 1. Once the new 146GB RAID array was ready, I rebooted and cloned backwards from the ext 146GB drive to the new array. Please note that in cloning these two times I did not go to the larger size. Once the old system was cloned to the new array. I booted the system and went into disk mgr and extended the 76GB partition to the full 146GB. If you have an interest full instructions are here: http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/1125
That being said, for PC BUs we use Norton Ghost 15. Last I checked a copy at Amazon was $35-40. Ghost with a 1 TB MyBook is a $150 solution for quick system recovery on a PC by PC basis. As a small company I wanted us to be able to recover our 3-4 executive machines quickly. With Ghost it takes 30-45 min to recover a 60-75GB system drive and the Ghosts can be scheduled to run every night to the local 1TB single drive and once a week Ghost out to a NAS. I do look forward to checking out the tools in the article out tho. As a geek there are always better ways and we are always in search of the best for our circumstance. Cheers

Why didn't you just pull one drive, let the system mirror, pull the second drive, let the system mirror again, and finally expand the partition(s)?

Is there a software available that emulates RAID-1? I have an Engineer who has a Toughbook he'd like to keep an exact duplicate drive of, real-time (he even bought a second HDD of the exact same model and put it in a USB enclosure). Unfortunately, to configure them for RAID in Windows 7, I'd have to wipe them both, which is totally out of the question.

I've upgraded notebooks to newer drives several times using Acronis True Image Home along with an external drive. I do an image backup to the external drive, swap in the new internal drive, then boot True Image Home recovery from CD and clone my old drive to my new drive from the image on the external drive.

The advantage is that I can ALWAYS step back to my old drive by simply re-installing it should anything go wrong. I can decide what to do with the old drive once I know everything is working properly on the new drive. Often I just pick up a cheap external drive case, securely wipe the old drive and either pass it on to one of my kids or use it to back up something else.

An important feature not mentioned is how does these cloning tools manage the larger capacity of the newer drives it is cloning to. Partition into a separate drive? Or need to use gparted to expand the capacity etc?

"Macrium Reflect Free Edition (Figure B) touts itself as one of the fastest disk cloning utilities available. This cloning solution supports only Windows file systems, but it does it quite well and has a fairly straightforward user interface."

I assume that you actually meant, it will only run on Windows operating systems.

I use Macrium Reflect Free Edition 4 to backup my OS and data partitions (XP, W7 and Ubuntu10).
I've only ever encountered one problem restoring my OS and data partitions, including Ubuntu.

OK ... I got a corrupted Windows image, once (some sort problem with the MBR, but I simply unchecked the replace MBR option, on the dodgy partition image and kept the MBR from one of the other partitions).

It is quick.
It images at ~3 GB/minute on my PC.

I used XXCLONE worked great for me. Plus it's free.

Give it a try.
www.xxclone.com

Personally, I would never clone an entire drive to a new drive because if you do that, surely you're also copying over all the crap that is on your current system! Doing a clean install of the OS may take considerably longer because you will have to download and install all your programs plus all the Windows updates again. But I think the extra time is worth it to get a nice clean environment without all the crap that has accumulated over time.

It's useful in shops that deploy many machines. You build one machine from scratch with the OS and most common apps, configure the most common settings and preferences, hen clone it to the others.

It's also useful in training environments. Multiple images are used to prepare computers for each upcoming class, and to overwrite the work done by the last class. More up-to-date shops now do this with virtual machines, but there are still plenty of places that re-image.

It's also good in workplaces where there are older critical systems with custom programming or with applications that no one can find the installation media for. Make images of them and store them on DVD for emergency use.