A hard drive crash is the most catastrophic when it comes to computers. Your data is a gold mine and you should treat as such. Having backup and imaging software can make a bad day turn into a good one. These programs can save your data, time and money.

Clone Maxx is the new professional hard drive copying program from CONVAR. Using the new direct DMA support, data can be copied from hard drives in high speed mode with speeds up to 3.3 GB per minute. Clone Maxx can be started directly from a boot diskette. The copying process is always based on the physical drive and is independent of the file system (e.g. FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, HPFS, NTFS, Ext2, Reiser, etc.) or the number of partitions.

Clonezilla This backup and image software is provided in the form of an ISO file, which you have to write to a CD or DVD. You then boot from it and use it to back up or restore your hard disk to another hard disk or the network. Not recommended for casual users.

Dubaron DiskImage backs up and restores partitions, hard disks, USB keys, floppy drives and even optical media (like CDROMs and DVDs). The image it makes may be compressed. It is for personal use only. Supported platforms: Windows 2000 and XP.

NFGDump is a Win32/Linux tool that dumps/restores NTFS (including 3.1=XP), COMPRESSED NTFS, FAT16, FAT32 and arbitrary (generic) partitions. Dump files support compression, encryption, splits, page file content removal, etc.

DriveImage XML is an easy to use and reliable program for imaging and backing up partitions and logical drives.

Image creation uses Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Services (VSS), allowing you to create safe “hot images” even from drives currently in use. Images are stored in XML files, allowing you to process them with 3rd party tools. Never again be stuck with a useless backup!

SystemRescueCD is a Linux system rescue disk available as a bootable CD-ROM or USB stick for administrating or repairing your system and data after a crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the partitions of the hard disk.

Ultimate Boot CD

You need the Ultimate Boot CD if you want to:

  • Run floppy-based diagnostic tools from CDROM drives. More and more PCs are shipped without floppy drives these days, and it is such a royal pain when you need to run diagnostic tools on them.
  • Free yourself from the slow loading speed of the floppy drive. Even if you do have a floppy drive, it is still much faster to run your diagnostic tools from the CDROM drive, rather than wait for the tool to load from the floppy drive.
  • Consolidate as many diagnostic tools as possible into one bootable CD. Wouldn’t you like to avoid digging into the dusty box to look for the right floppy disk, but simply run them all from a single CD? Then the Ultimate Boot CD is for you!
  • New! Run Ultimate Boot CD from your USB memory stick. A script on the CD prepares your USB memory stick so that it can be used on newer machines that support booting from USB devices. You can access the same tools as you would from the CD version.

Keep your data backed up and never worry about a system crash again!