In my humble-ish opinion, the problem with commercial hard drive duplication software is:

  1. It works when they first make it, then when Windows (or whatever OS) gets updated and it stops working, often you have to pay again or jump through licensing hoops to get an updated version.
  2. Commercial copy software is full of BLOAT in order to distinguish on piece of software from the other.
  3. It costs money.

So in the awesome open source / free duplication market, I’ve found these two to be the best:

Drive image XML (officially only free for personal use…meh) from Runtime software who also make some EXCELLENT deleted file recovery software (although not free).

This software is AWESOME for Windows XP image backups and disk-to-disk duplication. Only 6MB and can backup / duplicate a running system. They also have Live cd and WinPE bootable versions.

Clonezilla, one of those linux-live-cd-bootable make your whole life better ISOs. Download it, burn it, boot it, run it and SMILE. It’s FAST (like 8GB/minute local) and super simple

Happy duplicating

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