Image Backup Freeware

Image backup is used to refer to an image or snapshot taken of the entire hard disk, which will save a copy of every file in it’s current sate. Image backups are handy when you want to fully restore a computer to a previous state, let’s say that I take a snapshot or image of my hard drive today and tomorrow I mess up and delete the operating system, I can use the image backup to restore my computer and everything will be as I have it now, just as if the accidental delete never happened.

Image backup isn’t designed so a particular file or folder can be restored, even though there are some “image browsers” that will mount your image and will let you browse through it, they are not reliable enough and that’s not the main purpose of image backups.

Image backup freeware refers to software that is available free of cost to create and restore image backups.

Most image backup freeware is based on Linux, as Linux is a customizable open source operating system that can be trimmed down until it becomes so small that it can fit in a CD and allow you to boot to an operating environment straight from the CD. This doesn’t mean that it will only backup Linux computers, most image backup software will be able to handle most filesystem types including those used by Windows and Mac.

One of the most awarded image backup freeware products is CloneZilla, CloneZilla will fit on a CD that you can use to boot your computer and create an image backup. Most image backup programs will require you to shut down your installed operating system as it could lock files or keep modifying them while the backup is created which would compormise the integrity of the resulting backup. Once booted up, you can use CloneZilla to create an image of your hard drive and to save the resulting image to another media, which can be an external hard drive or several CD or DVD discs as CloneZilla is capable to split the image into smaller files so that they fit in removable media.

When needed, you can boot your computer with the CloneZilla CD and restore your computer using the image backups you created before.

CloneZilla isn’t the only image backup freeware available, there are others that behave pretty well like PING (short for PartitionImage is Not Ghost), SelfImage and NFGDump.