Macrium Reflect - Disk Imager

Who makes image of their hard drive as a back up? I do and it has saved me many hours of labor in reinstalling software. Whenever my computer acts weird because of some type of malicious activity, all I do is re-format and re-image my hard drive all within 30 minutes. Of course, I do have to re-load some of the latest FREE software not on the image on the computer when I make an updated clean image.

This method has saved me hours of labor and saved many important files and data when my computer crashed. Some people say, constant imaging of hard drive will shorten the life of a hard drive and my answer is, “really”. I agree it will shorten the life but nowadays hard drive is pretty cheap and so far one of my hard drive is still going strong after 5 yrs of use. The real questions we need to ask ourselves are how much is the files and data worth to us and labor time. You may agree or disagree with me but for your own sake just download the FREE software and make one back up image and save it on your external drive or on a different partition on your current drive. One image won’t kill your hard drive and down the road you’ll thank me.

Anyway, enough preaching and back to disk image FREE software. I found pretty neat software called Macrium Reflect that does disk imaging pretty well. This software, I was told, use to be not free a year ago but the company decided to make it free. They do have a paid version that does lot more, such as incremental imaging but from my experience the FREE version is all you need.

Excerpt from http://www.macrium.com/ReflectFree.asp

Absolutely free! No strings! The only free XP and Vista compatible disk imaging software with BartPE and Linux based recovery options.
-Create a disk image whilst running Windows using Microsoft Volume Shadow copy Service (VSS). -Image to Network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD. -Built in scheduler. -32 bit and native 64 bit versions. -Industry leading compression levels and speed. -Linux based Rescue CD with Network access and full GUI. Only 6.5MB in size! -Built in CD/DVD packet writing engine. -Supports packet writing to DVD DL media with Windows Vista. -HTML log files.
Try it and let us know how you like it.