need help to choose a good free imaging app.

Hi:

After thinking I have decided to use a imaging software to make an image of my HD and to uninstall comodo time machine. Since I am new at this, can anyone please suggest a FREE easy simple good and trustworthy imaging software to me? I want to make an image of my pc to fall-back on it when the need rises.

Thanks in advance.

 

Hi Taleblou! Recommend Macrium Reflect, Easeus Todo and Paragon Backup & Recovery (I think you still need to register for Paragon) - all 3 allow you to create a simple bootCD to restore an image should Windows become unbootable! These 3 are among the most reliable 3rd party free imaging programs available. Plus, don't forget Windows own imaging software - It's already on your system - ready to go - and probably the most reliable of the lot!

 

thanks. I heard of windows own imaging, but is it as good as as others? I mean in imaging a full image incl. everything on HD and also 3rd party programs on my pc?

What I want is a simple imaging software that when needed just use a few click and all is back to the same way it is?

At one time I tried kriver-1 restore free but it screwed my win. and had to reformat.

 

Hi taleblou,

Imho Win7's disk image backup suffers because of (at least) two major limitations:
1. There is no provision for validating the backup image!
2. There is no compression, so the resulting file is large!

Keriver 1-Click Restore is by far the simplest free disk-imager to use (I don't understand why it messed-up your system), although it is feature-limited. The free edition of Macruim Reflect is very reliable, but unfortunately it doesn't do incremental/differential backups! Quite a few users have reported serious restore issues with Easeus Todo Backup, so I never tried using it.

So in the free category I recommend Paragon Backup & Recovery Compact Edition which I have found to be highly reliable and more robust than most other free image backup apps.

Cruise

 

Windows Backup has a dead easy option to save your entire hard drive – (create system image) My only issue with Windows imaging is that it is now taking 2.5 hours to image my 100+GBs, whereas Easeus Todo, Macrium Reflect and Paragon Backup take one hour or less. I run images weekly using all 3 of these progams, so I don't bother validating my images – I've never had an issue yet.
IMO one of the biggest issues with free 3rd party imaging programs is their Linux based bootCDs – these can be problematical in 'seeing' your external drive where you wish to save\restore your images - ( I have issues myself with the Macrium bootCD) I find the Windows Repair CD the most reliable – (not to mention that you can use it for other 'troubleshooting' issues with Windows) - I've never had a problem with it not 'seeing' external drives - plus, finding\selecting an image to restore is easy.