Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Sweet Drive Cloning Software for Windows

Recently at work we've been looking for a solution similar to that popular disk cloning utility, only affordable. That is, we needed a program that wouldn't charge us per machine cloned like the other guys do. We also needed something that supported SATA drives (and preferably SCSI drives, too). Well, after a lot of searching, I finally came across what we've been looking for: Casper XP. Works with all the versions of Windows that we use, and apparently supports any sort of drive (IDE, SCSI, SATA, USB, FireWire...) and file system (NTFS, FAT32, FAT16...) that Windows natively supports. It even runs from within Windows rather than from a bootable disk,* which is very convenient. And the 30-day trial version is actually functional, so we were able to get started with a major project right away. So far, it's been awesome.

UPDATE: November 8, 2006
*Clarification:
Casper XP SystemBuilder Edition (which is what we use) comes with a bootable CD-ROM. You can actually use Casper XP either from within Windows or booted from a CD. If you're not a technician and just want to use Casper XP for home use, you can get a CD-ROM ISO for an extra fee when you buy the standard edition of Casper XP.

And while I'm revisiting this subject, I recently came across some free utilities that you might want to check out if you're interested in drive imaging or replication (please note that I have NOT tested any of these programs yet, so I don't necessarily recommend them; however, you might find them useful):
  1. DriveImage XML - Drive imaging allowing individual files to be restored from an image, plus direct drive-to-drive cloning
  2. DrvImagerXP - Drive imaging software
  3. DrvClonerXP - Partition-to-partition cloning software
  4. NewSID - Apparently, after replicating a drive for use in a second machine, changing the computer name isn't sufficient; that's where this SysInternals/Microsoft utility comes in handy
Also, on a recent edition of the MacBreak Weekly podcast I heard about a free (for personal use only) backup utility for Mac OS X: iBackup.

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