Free Hard Disk Backup / Restore and Image / Cloning Utilities

Backup, image or clone the partitions, files and folders on your computer

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Free Hard Disk and Partition Imaging and Backup Software

The hard disk and partition imaging software take a snapshot of your hard disk so that you can restore your system at a later time to the exact same state the system was when you imaged the disk or partition. This is useful for system recovery in case of a hard disk disaster. The term "image" is used because such software often copy the state of the hard disk sector by sector to your image. Hence if your hard disk was (say) defragmented with certain software occupying certain sectors when you backed up, it will be returned to that same state when you restore your backup. The image utilities often do not allow fine control what you backup - you can specify the partitions or hard disks to back up, but you usually will not be able to specify which folders to exclude or include. They are useful for backing up your system drive or partition, that is, the drive that you placed your operating system on. Hard disk imaging software are sometimes also used to clone a hard disk to another (useful for the times you change or upgrade your hard disk).

On the other hand, the hard disk, folder and files backup software listed here allow a finer control over what you back up. You can selectively backup and restore (say) your documents and email while omitting other files and directories. Some of the utilities allow you to schedule your backups, so that you can be sure that your important data are backed up periodically (for example, daily, weekly, monthly, etc). Depending on the utility, it may or may not support the backup of your system drive (the drive you booted from).

Note that commercial backup and imaging software, like Terabyte Drive Image Backup and Restore Suite (which works on Windows, Linux, and DOS), are not listed here, other than being mentioned in this introduction.

In addition, file synchronization utilities are listed separately on the Free File Synchronization Software page.

Skip to: [ Imaging and Cloning Tools ] [ General Backup Tools ] [ File Synchronization Tools ]

Free Hard Disk / Partition Imaging and Cloning Software

ODIN - Open Disk Imager for Windows: ODIN can make an image (ie, backup) of your entire hard disk or just a specific partition. You can use it to back up only the portions of your hard disk that is used, thus saving time and space, or to back up the entire disk/partition, including the unused blocks. The program supports both NTFS and the FAT family (eg, FAT32) of file systems. It allows you to split your backup files into smaller chunks so that you can burn it onto a DVD or CD. Both 32 bit and 64 bit versions are available. The program requires no installation, and can be run from a USB flash drive if desired. It is licensed under the GNU General Public License (ie, it's open source).
PING - PING Is Not Ghost: PING, or PING Is Not Ghost (formerly PartImage is Not Ghost), is a Linux/UNIX utility to make an image of your partitions in a file. It is able to image only used portions of the partitions saving time and space. The images are compressed. The utility supports the ext2fs, ext3fs, ReiserFS, FAT16, FAT32, HPFS, JFS, XFS, UFS, HFS, and NTFS file systems. This is a live ISO that you can burn onto a CD so that you can use it on any computer regardless of the operating system that is running.
NFGDump: nfgdump (NTFS-FAT-Generic dump) is a Windows and Linux tool that dumps (images) and restores NTFS, compressed NTFS, FAT16, FAT32 and any generic partition. Dump files (that is, the backup image) can be compressed, encrypted or split. The page file can also be omitted from the dump file / backup image. The software is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It runs under Windows 2000, XP and Linux. This is a command line program.
WinDD: This is a Windows version of the well-known (and versatile) Unix "dd" utility. It runs on Windows XP and is released under the GNU General Public License. Like "dd", the program simply makes a raw (uncompressed) copy of your hard disk. This is a command line program.
DriveImage XML: DriveImage XML is a hard disk imaging utility that allows you to backup a PC's hard disk or partition from within Windows. It can image a partition that is currently in use (such as the system drive), compress the image while backing up, restore an image to another partition/drive and clone a drive. Note that although it is able to image the system drive while you're working in it, it cannot restore the image to the system drive if it is currently in use.
g4u - Harddisk Image Cloning for PCs: g4u is a bootable CDROM, or if you prefer, floppy, that allows you to clone an image of a PC's hard disk for deployment on other PCs using FTP. The bootable floppy and CDROM supports both the cloning and restoration process. g4u supports any operating system on any filesystem. All you need are two floppy disks or one CD-R/RW, an FTP server and a DHCP server. The bootable disk uses a NetBSD system.
Partition Saving: [Update: this project is no longer being updated.] Partition Saving is an MSDOS hard disk imaging utility. Place it on an MSDOS boot disk and use it to image your Windows, MSDOS and Linux partitions. It supports the imaging of NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, FAT12, ext2 (and possibly other) partitions. It can do a sector-by-sector copy or (for the partition-types listed here) copy only the occupied sectors thereby saving space and time in your backups. It is able to automatically split the backup file into smaller files of a size you specify (useful if you plan to burn the backup to a CDR(W) or DVD+/-R(W) later). The backup file may be compressed with a compression level you select. Updated: starting from version 3.50, Partition Saving now works in Windows and can be placed on a BartPE Rescue CD.
PartImage: PartImage, or Partition Image, is a Linux/UNIX utility to make an image of your partitions in a file. It is able to image only used portions of the partitions saving time and space. The images are compressed. The utility supports the ext2fs, ext3fs, ReiserFS, FAT16, FAT32, HPFS, JFS, XFS, UFS, HFS, and NTFS file systems. Note that if you are not using Linux, and want to use Parition Image on a PC, look at the other entries on this page for PING.
SystemRescueCD: SystemRescueCD is a bootable system rescue CD-ROM for PCs containing utilities that allow you to manage and edit your hard disk partitions (GNU Parted and QTParted), image your hard disk partitions (Partimage), a partition table backup and restore utility (Sfdisk), various file system tools that allow you to format, resize and edit existing partitions on your hard disk. It does not depend on the operating system you have installed on your hard disk — the CDROM is self-contained and is designed to serve as a rescue disk. There is also a version for the blind (it incorporates a speech reader).
Ultimate Boot CD: Ultimate Boot CD is a bootable CDROM for PCs that contain a variety of software for diagnosing and fixing problems on your computer, managing your hard disk partitions, imaging or cloning your hard disk partitions (it includes Partition Saving, see elsewhere on this page), resetting your (forgotten) password on NT, Win2k, or XP, scanning your hard disks for viruses (it includes some free antivirus utilities), etc.
DiscWizard for Windows: If you are moving your system from an old hard disk to a Seagate disk, you can download this free software from Seagate make a clone of your existing hard disk on your new Seagate hard disk. The version, at the time this was written, also allows you to make a backup image of your hard disk and restore it. Besides running from your Windows system, you can also create a bootable rescue CD from which you can image, clone and restore your hard disk.
HDClone Free Edition: HDClone allows you to copy the contents of an IDE hard disk onto a larger capacity hard disk (SCSI drives are not supported). It is useful when you upgrade or change your hard disk and don't want to reinstall your system again. It creates a bootable floppy disk and allows you to clone your disk when you boot from it. It cannot copy to another disk of the same size, nor does it support the Ultra-DMA of modern computers (it uses the old and slower PIO modes).

Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore Utilities

Areca Backup: Areca Backup is an open source backup program that lets you back up a set of files and directories (folders). It can also perform post-backup actions, like send you an email backup report, run custom scripts (batch files), etc. Your backups can be a zip file, a standard directory containing your a copy of your original files or delta backups (where only modified portions of your files are stored), etc. The software also supports encryption (AES128 and AES256), compression (zip and zip64), incremental, differential and full backups, the ability to recover archives from a specific date, the use of source file filters (to back up according to extension, subdirectory, size, date, status, etc), file version tracking, a command line interface as well as a graphical user interface, etc. Windows and Linux versions are available.
Bacula - The Open Source Network Backup Solution: Bacula is able to backup, verify your backups and restore (recover from backups) across a network of computers. The site says that the program is an "enterprise-ready, network-based backup program" meaning that it is designed so that an administrator can easily manage the backups of multiple computers on a corporate network. (Note though that it can also be used on a single computer system.) Besides being able to back up to a hard disk, it can also backup to a tape drive (a list of supported tape drives is given on their site). This tool works on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and other Unix-type systems (including FreeBSD), although precompiled versions (that is, ready-to-run packages) appear to be available only for Windows and Linux. (If you have the know-how, you can of course download the source code and compile them into executables for your system yourself.) As implied by my earlier sentences, this program is open source.
BackupPC Open Source Backup: BackupPC allows you to back up your Windows, Linux and Mac OS X PCs, desktops and laptops to a server's disk. It either uses SMB, tar over SSH/RSH/NFS or rsync. The program is written in Perl and is open source.
Cobian Backup: Cobian Backup is a backup and restore utility that can backup your files and directories to another directory or drive on the same computer or to another computer on your network. It also supports FTP backup. You can compress and encrypt your backups. Standalone decompression and decryption utilities are also available so that if you wish, you can recover your files without having to use the backup program. Included with the backup program is a scheduler, so that you can schedule your backups to occur, say, every night when you are not using the computer. The program also supports remote backups. This is a Windows program.
FreeByte Backup: Freebyte Backup is a Windows program that supports the backing up files and directories to a backup directory. It also handles incremental backups, where only files not already in the backup set is saved, scheduled backups and profiles. This program does not appear to have been updated since 2012.

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