Any linux install media that also has live mode. Ubuntu/Mint family should even have a graphical disk utility that supports imaging these days. They also come with gparted graphical partitioning utility that helps fiddling with partitions (I've resized partitions so they can be cloned to differently sized drives) and for those that are not afraid of the command line, there is a very powerful tool called dd. Just last week I took an image of a whole 32GB Win7 SSD for backup purposes to a 1TB NTFS partition in the same system with Mint 18.2 USB stick using dd.

So, maybe not the best tool. But a tool I use, and available if you have no other tools than internet connection and a USB stick.

Macrium Reflect Free.

Clonezilla boots off a USB stick (or CD) and lets you do partition-to-image backups, saving them as files on other partitions or drives, which sounds like what you want. I use this to back up my boot partition monthly.

Just pay attention to the instructions, and don't do silly things like selecting your source partition when you're asked for the destination. 😀

In case this is important to you, Macrium Reflect runs in Windows and can be scheduled to run anytime. You create an emergency boot CD, which can be used to restore your backups in case the system is unbootable. You can selectively restore files as well as restore an entire image. And it works in XP (though it may require SP3, not sure).

I like Clonezilla too, but it is limited to manual runs from outside the OS. If I'm cloning a drive, I use Clonezilla, but if I want a normal backup package, I go with Reflect. I'd say Reflect is a better version of Windows 7's built in Backup and Restore. It does image-based backups, can restore selective files, but one thing it does that Backup and Restore doesn't is manage your backups. You can have it keep x backups and automatically prune the oldest backup. That's what I hate about Backup and Restore -- you have to manually go in and delete old backups, or you'll run out of space.

just dd it, simple, fast, free, open;
also: storing data in the free space of a partition is called creating a file ;p

+1 to Macrium Reflect from me too. It performs reliably, and is pretty fast taking those backups. I have multiple OS images (XP,7,8.1,10) that I made right after installation of drivers and applications I always install anyway, and I have two backups of my current OS. One from a known good configuration, that I manually update every once in a while, and one automatic backup, that backs up my system once every two days. The bootable disk you can make with it is pretty sweet too, since you can add drivers to it, so it can recognize AHCI and RAID configurations, that otherwise might not work when booted from a removable media.

Thanks for the replies, guys.

I guess I'll go with Clonezilla. Macrium sounds interesting, but Clonezilla can do its backup from live CD, can it not? I prefer something that doesn't require installation.

I wouldn't call Clonezilla a backup solution. It's a disk imager/cloner. But yes, it runs from live CD or live USB.

clueless1 wrote:

I wouldn't call Clonezilla a backup solution. It's a disk imager/cloner. But yes, it runs from live CD or live USB.

Well, I don't really need sophisticated features like differential backups or scheduled backups anyway. I just need something to restore my C:\ partition bit-by-bit just in case I goof up with drivers. 😁

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

clueless1 wrote:

I wouldn't call Clonezilla a backup solution. It's a disk imager/cloner. But yes, it runs from live CD or live USB.

Well, I don't really need sophisticated features like differential backups or scheduled backups anyway. I just need something to restore my C:\ partition bit-by-bit just in case I goof up with drivers. 😁

That's why I still use dd, even though Clonezilla can be thought as a user interface to it 😀 It will also come with OpenBSD floppy, so no need do download multi-gigabyte Linux USB/DVD images.

In fact most of my new PCs have been imaged by dd (in another machine or same machine) before even booting them for the first time from that drive, so they can be restored to same condition as it was unboxed.

@Jepael -- would you describe your process? What floppy or CD do you boot to, then what command switches do you use with dd?

Can Clonezilla clone a 250GB drive to a 120GB drive if only ~100GB is being used?

I remember trying to do this with Reflect, and it was a little confusing. This was because I had three drives on the 250GB drive, and I needed to cut the empty space from only the main (largest) drive.

^^ Yeah, it can collapse down free space. It might have trouble if the drive is highly fragmented though.

boxpressed wrote:

Can Clonezilla clone a 250GB drive to a 120GB drive if only ~100GB is being used?

I remember trying to do this with Reflect, and it was a little confusing. This was because I had three drives on the 250GB drive, and I needed to cut the empty space from only the main (largest) drive.

Best if you defragment the drive first and even temporarly shrink the partition to <120GB (to ensure no stray bits are hiding beyond the new destination size). Then when setting Clonezilla, you have to tell it to NOT check destination size and NOT automatically resize partition tables and such.

A note about Clonezilla: when I run Clonezilla with my 2TB external drive connected, Clonezilla correctly recognized my partitions as follows:
C:\ (internal hard disk): /dev/sda1/
E:\ (internal hard disk): /dev/sda2/
F:\ (internal hard disk): /dev/sda3/
W:\ (external hard disk): /dev/sdb/

However, it is not always the case. Once, for some unknown reason, Clonezilla recognized my partitions like this:
W:\ (external hard disk): /dev/sda/
C:\ (internal hard disk): /dev/sdb1/
E:\ (internal hard disk): /dev/sdb2/
F:\ (internal hard disk): /dev/sdb3/

Unfortunately, I make images of C:\ and E:\ under that condition, where they were recognized as /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb2. Then I booted Clonezilla again to test whether the images can be restored. Alas, during the 'restore boot', the partitions were again labelled correctly, with C:\ as /dev/sda1/ and E:\ as /dev/sda2/. When I restored, Clonezilla does not give error messages. But then the restore failed. How do I know the restore was failed? Because after backing up (and before restoring), I put a \Test folder in C:\. If the restore was successful, then the C:\Test\ folder should be gone. Still, it was still there after restoration.

Then I tried making backup again, this time without the external hard drive connected, so C:\ is correctly recognized as /dev/sda1/ and so on. Then I tried to restore, and it was successful.

I don't think this has anything to do with the mapping. The device nodes /dev/sdXX are created dynamically and can be assigned differently depending on order of insertion. Something else failed in this case.