Another Disk Imaging Software to Consider

PerpetualCycle said:

I have one of these by Sabrent. 5 drive bay, individual drive on-off, hot swap, USB-C, USB-C pass-thru port. Even though it is USB-C, the internal switching is USB-3, so you can only get about 500 MB/s (or two disk drive) aggregate speed. It suits my needs well though. Sabrent makes some pretty good quality stuff.

There is a newer version that supports raid.

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I actually seriosly considered getting this exact docking station. I have an obsession with HDD’s over SSD’s (for storage and backups)

PerpetualCycle said:

"By files" is not an image backup. You need sector by sector or file system layout for an image backup.

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You are mistaken.

A file by file backup probably won't copy the MBR / system partition. It is self evidently different from a full disk image!

SIW2 said:

You are mistaken.

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I seriously doubt it.

I can confirm that active@disk image pro makes a boot disk, but it is limited to 21days.

When I tried to create the boot disk it failed with this error.



It had wiped the disk but was unable to create the partition. So I used DiskGenius to partitition and format the USB stick.
Active@Disk Image was then able to create the boot disk.

If ADI can't make a rescue disk successfully, I wouldn't trust it with my backups!

I tried again and it failed the same way, even though it was the ADI boot disk I had just made!

The error is related to whether the usb is GPT or MBR.

kelper said:

If ADI can't make a rescue disk successfully, I wouldn't trust it with my backups!

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Hmmm that would also be my sentiment.

I've sent some feedback to Lsoft. I wanted to include the logs but it hadn't made any!

It's a promising but seriously flawed product.

I forgot to mention that diskgenius disk restore uses the source disk guid. So the source disk is offline when you boot into the restored disk

image file is crucial-diskbackup.pmfx

restore target is a WD disk





When booting into the restored disk , the disk booted into is online obviously.



the source is offline because it has the same disk guid

Please can you explain? Is this good, bad or just something to know? I don't understand.

Is it different to MR?

It is a design decision by the developer. Mostly people will want to restore the image to the original disk so they wont notice.
You would want it for a forensic image of course, which is when you are most likely to restore to a different disk.

That restore was an all files image, which some people on here mistakenly thought couldnt work.

An unusual feature is the abilty to edit an image file. I deleted a couple of photos from the image for a bit of fun before doing the restore

SIW2 said:

An unusual feature is the abilty to edit an image file. I deleted a couple of photos from the image for a bit of fun before doing the restore

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But you can do that with Macrium too. It's hardly a unique feature!

I'm surprised no one has mentioned TeraByte Unlimited's Image for Windows (IFW). It works with BitLocker and lets you configure every tiny little thing about how backup images are created or restored. And I don't know if this is still true, but for a very long time at least, it was the only imaging utility on the market that did full byte-for-byte comparisons of each backup. It's $60 USD as I write this, which costs more than some, but that includes versions for Linux, DOS, etc.

It doesn't let you edit images though, as far as I know. That would be a pretty nice feature for some, I guess.

kelper said:

But you can do that with Macrium too. It's hardly a unique feature!

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I wasnt aware macrium allows editing the content of an existing .mrimg file.

Is somebody able to confirm that claim ?


@kelper

You might be confusing it with editing a backup definition, which is something completely different.

All I was aware of is that you can choose to make the image (once mounted) writeable, ... but "all changes will be discarded."

@SIW2 On the Macrium forum it says you can, but it's not straightforward.

" Use viBoot to make the change and then export the modified state of that VM’s disk to a new Reflect image, which can even be an Incremental to save time and space. This capability is found in the viBoot application."

So we were both right

kelper said:

@SIW2 On the Macrium forum it says you can, but it's not straightforward.

" Use viBoot to make the change and then export the modified state of that VM’s disk to a new Reflect image, which can even be an Incremental to save time and space. This capability is found in the viBoot application."

So we were both right

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Done this many times.

that is not making changes to an existing image.

I have downloaded Terabyte to check this feature, but I normally delete unwanted files BEFORE I create the image!

SIW2 said:

It is a design decision by the developer. Mostly people will want to restore the image to the original disk so they wont notice.
You would want it for a forensic image of course, which is when you are most likely to restore to a different disk.

That restore was an all files image, which some people on here mistakenly thought couldnt work.

An unusual feature is the abilty to edit an image file. I deleted a couple of photos from the image for a bit of fun before doing the restore

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How do you do that? I tried with the viewer and by mounting the image. If I right click on a file or folder, 'delete' is greyed out.

Perhaps the trial version does not include this feature?

SIW2 said:

It is a design decision by the developer. Mostly people will want to restore the image to the original disk so they wont notice.
You would want it for a forensic image of course, which is when you are most likely to restore to a different disk.

That restore was an all files image, which some people on here mistakenly thought couldnt work.

An unusual feature is the abilty to edit an image file. I deleted a couple of photos from the image for a bit of fun before doing the restore

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But this screenshot is from DiskGenius! It's even called dg-edit-imagefile.jpg

I mistakenly thought you were talking about Terabyte!