If you don’t yet have a backup plan, it’s time you thought seriously about developing one. The effort involved in learning how to protect your data, by developing and implementing a backup plan in today’s computing age, is minimal. Much easier than it was, even as little as two or three years ago.
The best backup strategy includes imaging your Hard Drives and partitions, since that allows you to restore your important data, your complete operating system, as well as your installed applications, user settings, etc.
There are loads of free applications out in the wild blue that, used properly and regularly, will speed to the rescue. One of the best free program, that I have no difficulty recommending, is EASEUS Todo Backup 2.5.1.
This is a brilliant application that will allow you to backup, recover your backups, image your Hard Drives, clone your Hard Drives, and a host of additional features. All of this, in a “follow the bouncing ball” simple, user interface. If there’s an easier way to backup critical data, I have yet to find it.
Following installation, a restart is required.
The user interface has been designed so that a user with minimum computing experience, should have no difficulty.
The following screen captures illustrate the simple process of backing up a particular folder.
In this case, I choose the task name, selected the folder to be backed up, selected the backup media/location, and ….. Done!
Recovery, is point and click simple.
Additional functions and features are available under the “Tools” menu.
Fast facts:
Backup Management – By Managing backup tasks and plans, you can change a backup task or plan and execute the changes immediately, delete image files, and even convert a disk image.
Mount and Unmount – Mount a disk and partition image to a virtual partition (working as ordinary, logical drives) to explore or copy files in it.
Image Splitting – Split an image file into several files of specified size to fit different storage devices. This feature is helpful to burn the backup file to CD/DVD.
Image Compression – Compress a backup image to save disk space. The higher compression level, the smaller image is.
Check Image – Check the integrate of backup image. You can validate whether you will be able to recover from the backup image.
Disaster Recovery – Restore important files from backed up image and perform disaster recovery just by simple clicks. It ensures quick recovery from system crash, a personal error, hardware or software failure, virus attack or hacker’s intrusive destruction, etc.
Disk and Partition Clone – Migrate or copy all the data on a hard disk or partition to another.
Wipe Data – With this feature, you can erase all the sensitive data on a disk or partition to protect your privacy.
Bootable Media – Run EASEUS Todo Backup from an emergency disk to perform recovery in case of system crash, etc. USB drive, CD or DVD Bootable media can be created.
System requirements: Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Win 7 (32 and 64 bit).
Download at: Download.com
If you’re looking for a free application to handle all of your backup needs, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in EASEUS Todo Backup. Give it a try.
Note: EASEUS Todo Backup 3.0 is scheduled for release in Mid- August 2011. In the meantime, if you’re the experimental type you can download the Beta release – here.
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Bill Mullins' Weblog - Tech Thoughts 
Hi Bill,
Is cloning and imaging the same thing? Also, have you ever taken a look at Macrium Reflect?
Best,
John
Hi John,
Rather than reinvent the wheel – here’s a great explanation from Wilders:
Clone takes drive 1 and copies it to drive 2 such that drive 2 is identical to drive 1 although it is possible to clone different sized drives. True Image only clones entire drives it will not clone selected partitions. Cloning is intended to be used when you are replacing a drive with a new one but since you have a made a copy it does work as a backup.
An image reads the source drive and copies the in-use sectors to a file. It does not copy the pagefile or hibernation file (if present) since they are created on reboot. The data can be compressed and it is saved in a file or files. You can store as many images on the target drive as it will hold – compare this to only 1 copy if you are cloning.
When the image is restored it puts the data back but it does not necessarily put the data that was in sector ABCD back into sector ABCD; the file system is adjusted accordingly.
Since you can have multiple images and you can also make incremental backups (only the files that are created/changed since the last full or incremental are backed up) or differential backups (all the files created/changed since the full backup are backed up). This flexibility makes images more suitable for backup purposes.
Best,
Bill