Free Drive Backup Express

Paragon Software offers Free Drive Backup Express – their Free Backup Software.

Supported Operating Systems

• Windows Vista (32/64-bit)
• Windows XP Professional SP2 (32/64-bit)
• Windows XP Home SP2
• Windows 2000 Professional SP4

Supported Hard Drives and Removable Media

• Parallel ATA (IDE) HDD
• Serial ATA (SATA) HDD
• External SATA (eSATA) HDD
• SCSI HDD
• All levels of SCSI, IDE and SATA RAID controllers
• USB 1.x/2.0 and IEEE 1394 (FireWire) devices
• PC card storage devices

Supported File Systems

• NTFS (v1.2, v3.0, v3.1)
• FAT16
• FAT32
• Linux Ext2FS
• Linux Ext3FS
• Linux Swap
• HPFS

System Requirements

• CPU: Intel Pentium or compatible, 300MHz or higher processor
• RAM: 256 MB or greater recommended
• Disk space: 100 Mb
• Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher

Five Best Free System Restore/Disk imagers

Lifehacker has their Five Best Free System Restore Tools – Disk imagers.

You can find freeware to image your XP/Vista system in here somewhere.

Clonezilla will crush your drive cloning chores

Clonezilla is a freeware program to “clone GNU/Linux, MS windows and Intel-based Mac OS.”

It is intended to be comparable to programs like Norton Ghost and Partition Image.

It “can save and restore not only partitions, but also a whole disk.”  For “ext2, ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, and HFS+ of Mac OS” file systems it can save only the used blocks (so you’re not “saving” blank space, and can save to a smaller hard drive).

You can run the single version from CD/DVD/USB flash drive.

5 Free Apps to Clone Your Hard Drive

The Download Squad suggests 5 Free Apps to Clone Your Hard Drive

DriveImage XML

Runtime’s Shadow Copy

XXClone

EaseUs Disk Copy

PING (for Linux users)

Backup and Restore Image with Vista

Internet Fixes has instructions on how to do a complete backup and restore image in Vista.

Easeus Disk Copy freeware

Easeus Disk Copy is freeware “providing sector-by-sector disk/partition copy regardless of your operating system, file systems and partition scheme. The sector-by-sector method assures you a copy 100% identity to the original. EASEUS Disk Copy can be used for copy, cloning, or upgrading your original small hard drive to a new larger drive. Simply speaking, it can copy anything from the old hard drive including the deleted, lost files and inaccessible data.”

Macrium Reflect freeware for imaging

ClifNotesNewsletter has a review of Macrium Reflect, a freeware version of the disc imaging program.

Quote from the website
Absolutely free! No strings! The only free XP and Vista compatible disk imaging software with BartPE and Linux based recovery options.

• Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS).
• Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.
• Built in scheduler.
• 32 bit and native 64 bit versions.
• Industry leading compression levels and speed.
• Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size!
• Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista.
• HTML log files.

The web site is here for Macrium Reflect.

DriveImage XML backup software

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives. And it’s free!

The program allows you to:

Backup logical drives and partitions to image files

Browse these images, view and extract files

Restore these images to the same or a different drive

Copy directly from drive to drive

Schedule automatic backups with your Task Scheduler

Image creation uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe “hot images” even from drives currently in use.

Images are stored in XML files, allowing you to process them with 3rd party tools. Never again be stuck with a useless backup!

Restore images to drives without having to reboot.

DriveImage XML runs under Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista only. The program will backup, image and restore drives formatted with FAT 12, 16, 32 and NTFS.

In case of emergency (or other reasons) you can run DriveImage XML from a WinPE boot CD-ROM.

[update 2008/6/12]

A Softpedia review of a test using XP and Vista had a little trouble with Vista, but still managed a backup.

Imaging freeware: SelfImage

A backup is just a copy of whatever you select.   An “image” is a complete copy, usually of your entire hard drive, exactly as it is at that moment.  An image is more complete, but takes longer.  Still, an image allows you to re-create your hard driveSelfImage is freeware and open source software.  Free Download a Day has a description of SelfImage.

“There are bunches of tools out there that will let you create an image of a hard drive. SelfImage will let you create an image of a partition that is currently in use. Many disk imaging apps, like Ghost, require that you boot from a floppy or a CD rather than from the hard drive if you’re going to make a copy of that drive, but not SelfImage.”

The advantage of being “open source” is that a lot of people are able to improve and update the software, so it’s more likely to continue into the future.