USB Image Tool

Make an exact backup image of your USB Stick.


Features

• create image files of USB flash drives
• restore images of USB flash drives
• compressed image file format
• show USB device information
• manage favorite USB images
• command line utility

Supported devices


USB Image Tool works with any device, that implements the USB Mass Storage protocol. This includes flash drives, card readers and a lot of other devices, like digicams, cell phones and mobile music players.

It's a nice tool, I have been using it for years. But if you have Macrium Reflect v8 (Free or paid for) that can also make an image of a usb or SD card.

I am not sure what the need is. Seems to be a standard feature of imaging programs, I have used aomei and diskgenius for backing up usb sticks..they likely do sd cards as well.

SIW2 said:

I am not sure what the need is. Seems to be a standard feature of imaging programs, I have used aomei and diskgenius for backing up usb sticks..they likely do sd cards as well.

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Actually, this is a new feature for Macrium Reflect.

I used to use win32diskimager for SD card before.

With usb drives, I just did a normal copy with file explorer unless a bootable usb drive.

FreeBooter said:

Make an exact backup image of your USB Stick.

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Thanks @FreeBooter , life saver! I have been after a small program to do unscheduled backups of my portable devices.

iko22 said:

Thanks @FreeBooter , life saver! I have been after a small program to do unscheduled backups of my portable devices.

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You are very welcome!

iko22 said:

Thanks @FreeBooter , life saver! I have been after a small program to do unscheduled backups of my portable devices.

Click to expand...

A little tip I've found after years of using USB Image Tool.

The image it creates is a full copy of every sector from the USB, whether it's in use or not, and there is no compression used in the image. This means that the image file will be the same size as the USB's capacity.

Before I use it to make an image of a USB that has a significant amount of free space I wipe the USB's unused space and set it to all zeros to make it readily compressible. I use CCleaner for this, but there are many other tools that can wipe free space, just make sure you only do a single pass on unused space only. Then I point USB Image Tool to store the image in a folder that has been set to use NTFS compression. For a USB with very little on it, such as this 4GB USB for a bootable Minitools Partition Wizard, the space saved can be dramatic. A 3.72GB file that just uses 142MB to store it on the destination drive.

Bree said:

A little tip I've found after years of using USB Image Tool.

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Thanks for the tip! I was aware it makes full image. Still helps, as one or two of my sticks are quite full at the moment. However I still appreciate your idea - if cannot use compression during backup, then instead use NTFS folder compression - full marks for ingenuity

Bree,

I've not been backing up flash drives and had lost the contents on one last year.
The image somehow is better than saving to a SSD drive? (file vs image?)
Please display the menu that you use for Ccleaner on the USB flash drive for wipe.
What did you select or not select to make sure that the important files are not impacted?
Had you performed the steps when using ventoy?

zbook said:

I've not been backing up flash drives and had lost the contents on one last year.
The image somehow is better than saving to a SSD drive? (file vs image?)

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The Partition Wizard USB in my example is a bootable syslinux USB. A simple file copy cannot re-make bootable USBs that use a non-MS OS, USB Image Tool can.

zbook said:

Please display the menu that you use for Ccleaner on the USB flash drive for wipe.
What did you select or not select to make sure that the important files are not impacted?

Click to expand...

It's a slow process to wipe a lot of free space, but this is what I use.....

zbook said:

Had you performed the steps when using ventoy?

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Not tried, but I see no reason why it shouldn't work.

FreeBooter said:

Make an exact backup image of your USB Stick.

Click to expand...

In the past I had used the USB Image Tool for sometime until I found ImageUSB by Passmark Software.