Free Image Backup and Restore Tool!

MCHAL · Post by **MCHAL** » 2009 Mar 22, 18:49

Visit Tinyapps for the link, please, here:

http://www.tinyapps.org/weblog/

There is also another free alternative (Macrium Reflect), but the free version does not create incremental or differential backups. It claims to be the fastest one of its kind on the market. Indeed, upon testing it on my rather slow machine (Celeron 2.2 Mhz, 256 KB MCache, 512 MB RAM), I was impressed at the backup job it did of making a restore image with almost 5 Gig of data in less than 4 minutes! Available from:

http://www.macrium.com

Another free one, "similar" to the above (it claims to use ULTRA DMA under pure DOS, just as the shareware Drive Snapshot - http://drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm [very fast backups also within Windows!], which theoretically speeds up the backup job considerably, is Partition Saving - i've not tested it with this added DMA feature yet. Available here:

http://damien.guibouret.free.fr/en/index.html

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Yesterday (28.4.2009), I discovered ShadowProtect (http://www.shadowprotect.com). I'm impressed at its amazing backup speed and data compression rates! It did a backup job of a partition here with 3.5 GB of data in size in mere 2 minutes, outputting a compressed archive of just 1.2 GB in size, using the normal compression level (see my modest hardware configuration above)! Do you know of a better performance from similar programs out there? Well, let me know about them! In my unpretentious, humble analysis and tests done here, ShadowProtect seems to beat all programs of its kind I know of! Worth a try. However, the program (at least, not the trial version) does not restore from within Windows itself; this is done from a boot .iso CD, which does not come with the setup bundle in the trial version.

Hope these help you guys in your daily "chores" of keeping your data secure or in case you need to rescue some of it eventually!

Regards from Brazil.

PS: Sorry for being off-topic, but have you ever heard of Lingoes? If not, I guess you should. Go there! http://lingoes.net/en/ - wonderful, free multilanguage dictionary tool!