Macrium Softwar

[Bill Bridges]

Has anyone tried Macrium Software's disk clone software. The basic is reasonably priced at "free". This is the link to the free version.

[Russell Holton]

No. But I have been using Clonezilla. It's also reasonable priced, but it has an interface that's rather intimidating.

My primary use is not to copy drive to drive, but make a backup image file that can later be restored to a drive. (Imaging a computer from a master image.) But I'm sure it could probably do direct drive-to-drive as well. With 4T external drives quite affordable, you can keep multiple backup copies on the one drive.

A 50GB image loads/saves in about 20 minutes over USB 3.

[Bill Bridges]

No. But I have been using Clonezilla. It's also reasonable priced, but it has an interface that's rather intimidating.

My primary use is not to copy drive to drive, but make a backup image file that can later be restored to a drive. (Imaging a computer from a master image.) But I'm sure it could probably do direct drive-to-drive as well. With 4T external drives quite affordable, you can keep multiple backup copies on the one drive.

A 50GB image loads/saves in about 20 minutes over USB 3.

I am just going to use it as a backup for my computers. I bought 8TB WD for $140.00.

Do you recommend just making as image of each drive on a regular basis?

[Russell Holton]

Clonezilla will do that just fine (once you get past the interface - but there is a command line that could speed that along). What it won't do is incremental backups. And restore is all or nothing.

It's a good choice to quickly restore a machine. I use it a lot in testing and development. But personal use I'd use another solution for general backup just so I could have fast (incremental) backups and be able to recover a file or two without doing a full restore.

[Ray Tackett]

I clone system drives with "Driveimage XML" (free for personal use). It makes restoring systems much faster than reinstalling, and it has an XML database which serves as a directory, so individual files can be picked out.

I keep installed software on system drives, and my data on other drives or partitions, so the system image is as small as conveniently possible. My data has a daily backup schedule to other machines on the LAN*. The process takes 28 days for a change or deletion to percolate through completely. That protects SWMBO from an OOPS delete she doesn't realize for a while. System images are treated as data directories for backup purposes, though I have two critical system images restored to spare drives on the shelf.

*At one time, I had recommended SimplySafe for cloud storage. I can no longer do so, and am no longer a customer. The site's software had an annoying bug. The Grand Forced Upgrade made that bug worse and introduced another. For me, the value for the money was gone.