HD Clone. Another quick and dirty hard disk cloning program. The free version gives you basic disk to disk, partition to partition imaging, which is great for cloning an old drive up to a shiny new large drive. The free version is also deliberately speed hobbled, so you’ll need to be prepared to wait a while if you have a large disk you want to upgrade or restore.

Truesafe Personal Edition. Free version of the company’s commercial product, with a severely crippled set of features and a nasty nag screen which keeps asking for you to sign up for a Truesafe account. The program purportedly includes a fairly rudimentary file and folder backup scheduler, but it’s hard to tell since I couldn’t get the thing to work at all. An excellent example of how not to supply free software to boost your commercial offerings.

ODIN Imager. Another one trick solution, disk imager and cloner. Set it up to snapshot your drive and it will happily do the job, no frills. Press the other button and you’ll get to restore. No frills. The program can, however, be run from a USB stick, and it does support multiple CPUs, although in testing it was still pretty slow to do the job. Speed comes at a price it seems. For a new open source project it does have some nice features, however, like verify, file splitting and backup of only used areas. Worth a look.

Dubaron DiskImage. You don’t get much geekier than this ancient open source project. The shudderingly intricate user interface hides a legion of functions and pitfalls for the unwary. Hex view, virus scan, checksum your drives and partitions. Read the master boot record, even. And of course image your disk for safekeeping. Definitely not one for the faint hearted.

FOG Disk Cloner. Fog is a Linux based disk cloner designed to let people remotely clone Windows XP/Vista hard drives. Why? Well if you’re the admin of a large population of PCs this is a quicker, cleaner and faster way of adding new machines than manually installing new Windows installations each time a new computer is purchased. If you’re not into hardcore sysadmin, stay away from this puppy, ‘cause it will make your eyes hurt.

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