Good Free Full "Image" Hard Disk Backup program for Windows

Thanks for postig, Freeze..I'll investigate it further.

Cursory check has no indication that one can restore individual files or folders, to either the original, or a chosen location.

To me that's important because it is a feature of Acronis True Image that I favor and have found reliable and very useful.

However, being free, and likely useful, it's worth checking into it, and I will.

The other things of concern are: will they work well over usb drives, over firewire drives?

And, of course, making a backup may be easy, but restoring it is what can bring the sweat to the armpits, and how long it takes to do it.

NoKey


Thanks for postig, Freeze..I'll investigate it further.

Cursory check has no indication that one can restore individual files or folders, to either the original, or a chosen location.

To me that's important because it is a feature of Acronis True Image that I favor and have found reliable and very useful.

However, being free, and likely useful, it's worth checking into it, and I will.

The other things of concern are: will they work well over usb drives, over firewire drives?

And, of course, making a backup may be easy, but restoring it is what can bring the sweat to the armpits, and how long it takes to do it.

You right NoKey, I edited my original post to remove the mention of individual files. LOL, the funny thing is, I assumed that since it done a Full Image backup that it had that option, ya know it's normally the other way around where most programs will let you backup files and not the whole hard drive image. Either way it's pretty cool for a freebie. It's not better than Acronis True Image by no means, but it's free and it does what it says it does.

I'm glad you noticed that. Thanks. My external Hard Drive is connected via USB and I had no problems using this program. I was just looking in the PDF docs and it says that it supports : "IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB, and Firewire". It says the smallest capacity is 2 GB's and the largest is 1.5TB's. It also says that CD-R/RW, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW are all supported.

If there's a incremental option I don't see it, or apparently this program doesn't have it, I tried selecting the backup archive and it told me it would overwrite it so there doesn't appear to be one.

I couldn't stand it so I went back and formatted my hard drive and used this program to completely restore it with and it worked fine. So for a Complete backup program I have to say for a freebie this one does work. At least it did for me.

BTW: I'm checking out 3 other FREE backup programs that promise to do a full image backup, I'll reply back later and let everyone know the results if they are interested. If they work I'll post a link to the programs here.

Some of them are even promising incremental backups, FTP support, individual file backup, scheduling and more. We shall see.....


Bobby

If my hard drive died, could the image be restored to any ole hard-drive

With Acronis it can. My HD for my operating system (C drive) died about 6 months ago and I just re-imaged it from the last back up I made and it worked.
I update my image weekly, to keep it up to date

Philip


Freeze, Tap, NoKey, or anyone, I currently use Win7's Backup (Dell had another one which I disabled).

Mine backs up every Weds, 3 a.m. into a separate drive folder called WindowsImageBackup.

I'm a noob when it comes to backups and don't understand everything:

1) Would that be 'about as good' as the "Todo" or Clonazilla stuff?

2) If my hard drive died, could the image be restored to any ole hard-drive

3) Operating system and all?

Hi Philip,

Clonazilla runs in Linux, It is very powerful as such, and can while running in Linux backup windows formatted disks. But most Sonar people run Windows, so they couldn't run it unless they have double boot to linux, or move the hard disk to linux. Clonazilla does not have indifidual file/folder retrieval....By the way, in Linux one can clone a dkisk directly from the command line, or save an image, in just a few strokes...No need for a program, but really needs a lot of care and precision  to do it right, and bad sectors can be a problem, which backup programs shuld take care of.

I run linux and there are many more options in Linux for systems maintenance than in windows. But, even so, the Acronis True Image, and the Acronis Disk-Manager are my preference...The engineers at Acronis are actually Linux Experts. Acronis running in Windows can ALSO backup Linux partitions when one has double boot, by the way.

So, I use Acronis and there are also caveats, that I encountered, but may no longer be there in newer versions.

One such caveat was that when I tried to do  an Acronis restore from my 1-TB firewire,  it was  not possible.  But that drive has also USB port, and from USB it was OK.  I forgot if either the program told me that, or if I googled it out....Yet the backups via firewire are OK, and I do at time bring back individual files or folders, and the drive is always on firewire..

Individual files, I never bring them to the original location, though.. I prefer to bring them elsewhere, as at times I want to compare.

So, I'd recommend Acronis, because of its many features, most mentioned, and others there but too many to list, or to remember off-hand.

I don't know about the newer windows included backups as to restoring to new hard disks....But one thing with Microsoft is that they don't like hard-disks with the op system being reproduced..That's one reason I got and use Acronis.

I don't favor incremental backups...That's because if you get a problem, such as a malware, or you delete something accidentally, your incremental backup will be the same as what you have currently running. So I keep  at least two full backups in the external drive. I have the data always on a separate partition, for that reason also, and have the OpSys partition small for that purpose. The data I just copy directly from internal partition to external drive as a backup, so the data is transportable, available, and verifiable in conventional format.

A small opsystem partition has the advantage of faster backup and RESTORE, no data mixed there. And it's where virus or malware install, anyway, and where a failure no one wants. So I keep it as simple as possible, about 20 gig. It can be smaller, but about 15%  or so is required of free space to defragment a drive. Keep also in mind that a RESTORE from Acronis can take up to 10 or more times (in time) than the time it took to create the backup.

Regardless of all this, never forget that the most important thing to backup is the data, specially if it is the reult of your own work, and NOT available elsewhere!....And most important: that data can be backed up simply by copy conventionally to a separate media..So no need for special program is needed...Nor even a special drive, for the media can be a rewriteable DVD or so...However harddisks are cheaper (megabyte per dollar) and much more reliable than DVDs, AND MUCH FASTER.

So if we get too tangled up, or rely solely in backup programs and techniques, we can surely miss the boat.

 When you first get your computer, I don't care what anyone says here, if it didn't come with a full backup disc of the operating system, then "MAKE A FULL HARD COPY BACKUP ON DISC OF YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM" - FIRST THING! 

As for backing up your system, you can use the program I posted in the original message, just create a "Recovery Disc on a blank Disc" first, then backup your entire system to your external hard drive, FireWire or USB. It's free, and it compresses the files so it's a free added means of keeping things backed up.

If for nothing else, it backes up your system so that license keys and various other things are kept. Some companies will only allow you so many re-installs of their product even though you purchased it. But if you have the key then you can just restore what you lost completly with an Image Backup.

You should always maintain a secondary IMAGE BACKUP once a week IMO, if for nothing else, to save you time for updates and such.

As for CD/DVD backup I've already talked about backing up your entire system if it didn't come with disc to back it up first to disc before doing anything at all.

Although I will say, it's a good ideal to make a hard copy of your master files for your daw and important files on cd/dvd from time to time just to be safe IMO.

As I said the program I mentioned in the original post seems to be a good COMPLETE IMAGE backup program. Image Backup is important because as I said it backs ups keys to use programs you might have registered on your computer.

Good Luck,

Bobby