Best Free Drive Imaging Program

Easeus Disk Copy Home Edition 2.3.1 is FREE. Did you check the "CLONABILITY" of it?

Where to start?

Grrrlgeek suggested Easeus 2.5.1 as it had 'universal restore' included. Could not find this version, but did find (and d/l) version 2.5.

Ran it and copied (imaged) my external xp drive to a partition on my ntfs laptop. Not sure what I got, as I have the shortcut for it, but no file; AND my original xp drive is now in raw data state.

Easeus know about this, as this is what is on their "Troubleshooting" page
5. Why does the NTFS partition displayed as RAW after clone, and I cannot access it?
We think your original NTFS partition is written protected, please remove this attribute and then try again.

To compound their ignorance, how can the drive be "write-protected" if it managed to RE-WRITE the ID, or mbr, or or partition table?

I don't know how old this (useless info)is, so I don't know if they have become enlightened or not.

I have had testdisk suggested, but from what you said in another thread, it looks dicey, if I don't know what I am doing.

As for some feedback/questions about some of the other products

With Macrium Reflect, I cannot see how to image my external disk to a partition I created on my active drive. It ONLY wants to "clone" it to the 1st partition, where the system files are - and I had this confirmed by Macrium. In the "clone" option, it asks me if "I want to select another source" - such as the external drive, but in the "image" option, it does not give me that choice. Have I missed something?

I have a trial of Acronis, but the "image" option is disabled.
Do you know if this is also the case with the Paragon free edition.

Will PartedMagic be able to what i want; and can it be mounted in a VM, or should I go the Paragon route with their P2V?

Thanks

I just gave this article a 5-star rating because it led me to Macrium Reflect and delivered me from Dell Hell.

A word of explanation: "Dell Hell" is the lowest level of the dark underworld you enter when you buy your first Dell computer and try to deal with their software support tribe. As you might know, Dell computers come with a factory-fresh disk image in a seperate partition from which you can use the preinstalled Dell Datasafe Basic to restore your computer to its original state. You can even use it to create recovery USB flashdrives (optical disks aren't even worth mentioning) that hold the same disk image that is in the recovery partition and satisfy the no-brainer requirement that you need to be able to repair a severly crashed hard drive from EXTERNAL media.

So far so good. But, of course, what you really want to be able to do is restore your computer to the state it was in just before that malware took you down. That is, you need to be able to create NEW disk images. In order to accomplish this I shelled out $40 to upgrade to Dell Datasafe Premium which was touted as being able to do "full system backups". I had read in other forums that the problem with this program is that it can only write the new image file to the C: drive. I couldn't believe that anybody would bother to develop software that uses the device that's most likely to be in need of repair as the default location for the recovery file - but that's what they did! Ok, you can also save the disk image to an external hard drive (expensive) or a mile-high stack of DVDs. But the obvious place to put it is on a bootable USB flashdrive. I tried a 16 GB flashdrive and got the meassage that this was "unsuitable external media" so I bought a 32 GB flashdrive. I got the same message. I bought a 64 GB flashdrive. I got the same message.

In desperation I contacted Dell software technical support. I was informed that that for a "nominal fee" they could tell me how to get their program working with a USB flashdrive. I had to listen to a very long sales pitch in broken English. I still don't know how much the software support contract costs because when she said, "two hundred ..." that's when I started screaming.

Realizing that Dell Datasafe was a Dell Deadend I stated looking for an alternative. I found the above article and my life changed. I now have a bootable 64 GB USB flashdrive that on boot loads WinPE and Macrium Reflect. Reflect instantly recognizes that there's a complete disk image sitting right there on the flashdrive and offers to install it. That image not only includes the C: partition with all my installed apps and data but also the recovery partition that holds the factory image. My hard drive could be totally trashed and I could still completely restore it from this flashdrive!

And thus I ascended from Dell Hell to Macrium Heaven. And not for two hundred and something dollars but for free! (I'm not counting the cost of the flashdrive - I love these things.)

OK, sorry. Last post.

I just had a great experience with a Windows fresh-install that I hope will help others.

I decided to upgrade to 64bit -- the one scenario where image backups are no help. I was prepared for a horrendous ordeal trying to upgrade all of my software and drivers, and get my settings back to just the way I like them. But it wasn't bad at all.

Two things saved me:
1. I had made a Windows Easy Transfer backup of my settings a while ago, JIK -- and "just-in-case" happened! I didn't expect the recovery to go well at all, but surprisingly, all of my little tweaks, my Start Menu shortcuts, and even my Video Card settings were back to "normal." My speakers suddenly sounded good again too! Tip: Customize your W.E.T. backup. I didn't let it backup "My Documents," etc because I have those on other drives. But FORCE it to backup your AppData and your ProgramData folders. This is where all of your software settings are.

2. For a long time I have been installing the portable version of almost all of my software on a second hard drive (many programs can be forced into portable mode too -- like Firfox.) I did this for speed, and so that I could access what I needed in a triple-boot system without hassle. Well, side effect: When I restored my Start Menu shortcuts with W.E.T. the programs on my 2nd hard drive linked right up to them -- no re-install needed. And, thanks to saving the AppData folder, the other programs I re-installed needed no configuration.

I was truly surprised at how smoothly this went. But I was shocked when Windows was able to restore my Video and Sound card settings -- these weren't even the same drivers. Impressive.

So make a Windows Easy Transfer backup, and install your programs on a different partition. You'll live to smile about it when your imaging software fails you.

Compared to EaseUS Todo Backup all of these others (as far as I know) are missing on huge thing: "Universal Restore" or "Recover to dissimilar hardware" as they put it.

You know all of those Windows boot problems that require dropping to the Recovery Console, and hours of endless frustration? It happens with EVERY imaging product using Windows 7. If you change the slightest drive configuration it stops cold. Even a normal recovery with EaseUS will do this.

The "Universal Restore" option, only on the WinPE boot disk, will get Windows to boot on just about anything.

I built a new PC recently and didn't feel like going through the pain of a fresh Win7 install. Once the everything was up and running I plopped my EaseUS boot CD in, clicked "Universal Restore", browsed to the old computer's backup image, and was booted into my old Windows installation in literally 9 minutes!

Before rebooting I installed my motherboard, network, and video drivers (it won't boot again otherwise,) then called Microsoft to tell them what I had done. They reactivated my copy without a problem.

Here is another easy link to free EasUS Todo Backup and, more importantly, to their old versions! 2.5.1 was the last version that had all the great features missing now, even in the paid versions. With Windows AIK installed, version 2.0, if I remember correctly, allowed you to make a WinPE boot disk. However, 2.5.1's Linux disk has the all-important "Universal Restore" feature as well.

The entire version history can be found at the "Filehorse" website (Gizmo wouldn't allow the link, sorry. It's the first hit in Google though.)

Worth mentioning?
1. XXClone
2. GImageX: Graphical interface for ImageX

With EaseUS Todo Backup I prefer to stick with version 2.5.1. They have changed it drastically in later versions. Many features are gone, and the interface is now very confusing. Incremental backups are difficult; no "Backup Management" or notes; limited boot-disk options, and I could swear it's slower. I think converting images to VMware machines is gone too.

They say USB 3.0 is now supported in their latest version, but I did my new PC recovery, mentioned above, entirely over USB 3.0, so it's just fine in 2.5.1 as well.

The documentation on the Website has been over-hauled, and it makes no sense now! In addition they are no longer allowing free users to post questions in the forum. I actually don't mind paying a small fee for the amazing things this software does -- I'm going to. But I don't see why they would prevent free users from helping each other out. We can't even search through the old answers in that free forum because they deleted it -- leaving a few half-starved threads in the paid forum to pick through.

Unless someone tells me there's another option that provides "Universal Restore," encrypted folder backups that you can browse through, incremental backup, and virtual-machine conversion (not mandatory,) I am paying the fee for the support. Honestly, they deserve it. The program rocks!

The Drive Imaging review omits a couple of important issues that I belatedly discovered after having lost years of data less than two weeks ago. I have used Acronis (paid), Macrium Reflect (free), and EaseUS todo (free). All of them failed to image all of the contents of my hard drives but the discussion that follows relates to EaseUS 4.0.

I am not exactly sure why they failed to image all of my contents, but through experimentation, and a little knowledge I tracked the failure to two issues: Windows 7 has a 255 file path limit (some people ambiguously refer to this as a 255 character limit ) and Windows 7 has what I call an "administrator bug."

For example, I had a folder that contained 20 separate files labeled 0-XXXX through 20-XXXX (where XXXX represents the file name). Some of the file names were short resulting in a file path of less than 255 characters, e.g., C:\Users\John Doe\Desktop\Test File\12345, and other were very long. I did a Disk/Partition backup (not a File backup) using EaseUS Todo on 03/15/2012, and recovered this backup on 03/28/2012 after I did something stupid. I almost immediately sensed that something was wrong during the recovery, since "fail to recover" type messages starting appearing on the screen.

After recovery finished, I immediately started going through my folders to see if all of my records were intact, especially the ones listed on the "fail to recover" screen (I used the Snipping Tool to take a screen shot of the messages). To my horror, of the 0-20 files in the folder mentioned earlier, I was missing about half of them. Almost all of the missing files had very long file paths, but some of the the missing files had short file paths--why were they not recovered? In addition, there was a disconnect between the records listed on the "fail to recover" screen shot and what I actually found: some files were missing that were not on the "fail to recover" screen shot.

Before I did the recovery on 03/28/2012, I had copied (not Disk/Partition or File backup) all of my personal files using Teracopy from the bad computer to a backup hard drive. I decided to compare these copied folders-files with the Disk/Partition recovery copied folder-files. Unfortunately, Teracpy also did not copy everything since I was missing all my files with long file paths. Further research revealed that Teracopy does not copy files where the file path is more than 255 characters, unless you manually change a setting so that it does--too little, too late for me (Teracopy is now uninstalled on my system since I now consider it junk).

However, I learned of the "administrator bug" while copying whatever missing files that Teracopy had and what EaseUS did not have from the backup drive drive to my recovered computer. Teracopy refused to copy certain files to the recovered computer. I then bypassed Teracopy and attempted to use Windows' copy/paste to copy the files, but every file generated a "do not have permission to access file" type message and I had to go through several steps to get the files to copy. This made no sense, since I am always signed in as the Administrator and all of the files are created as an Administrator. I then turned off UAC and restarted my system, and tried to copy the files again. I now was able to copy the files without any issues.

I then compared the file paths and names that EaseUS failed to recover earlier against those that Teracopy failed to copy before I turned off UAC (at least those for which I could compare, since neither fully contained all of my prior data). Sure enough, EaseUS failed to recover the exact same files that generated the earlier "do not have permission to access file" type message when I used Windows' copy/paste.

Thus, can someone recommend an imaging program (for which they ACTUALLY VERIFIED the before AND after data results) that images ALL data regardless of the length of the file path and irrespective of whether the file was created as an administrator? Can someone explain why folders-files created using an Administrator account become inaccessible when opened while logged in as an Administrator (the same Administrator at that) and why such files do not image or copy? If not, all of the recommended imaging programs are worthless. I wonder if the reviewers for this article actually verified that their data was copied instead of just commenting on program features and time to image. I used TreeSize free to do some comparisons after made the above discoveries, and determined that huge amounts of data were not copied. The bad thing about all of this is that I should have known about the 255 character limit and issues with imaging programs, since Acronis (paid) and Macrium (free) also failed me. Argh!

Any opinions on Karen's Replicator and Keriver One Click Restore?

In your review of imaging programs you state:

The following offer their programs from restricted servers, i.e., download managers/resumable downloads are not permitted:

Macrium http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp

However this is not so as I went to their webpage and was directed to c/net/ download.com when I clicked on the free version download. I was then able to use a download manager and resume an interrupted download. As a download manager I am using the free version of "Download Express"

Charlie

Difficult to find via their site (not good) but finding your way to Easus Todo Backup Free via alternative (standard?) way is simple:
Just google for "easeus todo backup free"...

Does that justice:
"Extra Extra, read all about it, Easeus todo the unthinkable, they have gone paid all the way, they offer a 2-week demo, but they no longer have a free version, at least not that I can find."?

Not sure what the future will bring but I have not seen any official statement about the free version not being available anymore.