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Does anyone know of a piece of software that can perform a restartable raw copy of a disk drive?
You are basically describing GNU ddrescue which can be run from a bootable Linux live CD/DVD/USB (I like SystemRescueCD quite a lot).
Cloning the drive
First, you should identify the drives you have connected to your computer with the fdisk -l command. Here is ...
8
I love using Defraggler to defragment my computer. It's made by Piriform, the same company that makes CCleaner and other such software. This is what it looks like:
Pros:
It's free!
Lets you look at SMART information (the health of the hard drive)
Gives you a visual of what parts of the hard drive are fragmented
Lets you choose individual files to ...
5
Ubuntu already includes a disk space warning alert as part of dconf.
You can configure the settings by installing the dconf-tools:
sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
Start the dconf Editor:
dconf-editor
Press CRTL + F to show the find option.
Enter "disk space" and click on "Next"
You can set the free percent warning to whatever you like.
This example ...
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Until a yearor two back, the definitive answer would have been TrueCrypt.
I still use it myself, but, as it is no longer actively developed, you might want to choose one of the forks, based on its source code. VeraCrypt seems to be the best.
It is cross-platform, gratis and its source code is published on the web for peer review.
VeraCrpyt supports ...
answered Aug 22 '16 at 8:33
Mawg says reinstate Monica
7,7114 gold badges23 silver badges68 bronze badges
4
Clonezilla will do this
Need to be free for non commercial use: Its FOSS
Can create a disk image into a single file: Yes, even with multitple partitions
Can restore the single file to the hd: Absolutely. backups are no good without restores
Can save the image file into an external usb drive: Yes
Can create a boot CD/DVD to perform both image backup and ...
4
You can use HD Tune Pro
has a trial version so it is gratis as a one-time use software
able to check my Crucial M4 SSD and Western Digital HDD. (first-hand experience since I have both)
simple to use
I've been using it for years, always happy with it
Error scan (quick and slow scan):
Health:
Speed map:
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These days there are many readily available consumer SED self-encrypting drives and OPAL drives which encrypt all the data written to the disk memory (for SSD's) or surface, using a key that must be configured every time the disk is powered up. By resetting the key inside the drive all data on the drive is instantly lost and cannot be recovered. (This is ...
3
You can use Adroit Photo Forensics:
non-free but trial available
extract JPEG files from dump data files:
According to their Adroit Photo Forensics (from which you can see a few other applications if you want to give a try to them too):
PhotoRec is the only free (and open source) in the list.
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I personally use Paragon NTFS for Mac. It costs about 16.95 per license, but I have yet to find a better driver for Mac and it's extremely easy to use. I have yet to have anything bad happen to any of the drive that I hook up to it. They recently added support for OS X 10.11 El Capitan!
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I had good luck with Unstoppable Copy. I was able to get many files from a hard drive with many bad sectors when an ordinary Windows or DOS copy was giving me CRC errors. Most of the files were usable, even those that Windows was failing to copy; I only lost a few photos that had too much data gone.
Spinrite may actually be more effective at fixing data, ...
3
When I used Windows nothing was better than MyDefrag, which was the remake of JkDefrag.
Among their pros includes:
Several scripts installed by default and ready to use for most cases you can find, from floppies to SSD's, ordered by monthly, weekly and daily use to desfragment and optimize the order of files.
Based in the MS defragmentation API, so it ...
3
DriveImage XML should meet your requirements.
Citations from the website matched to your criteria:
Private edition free
Backup logical drives and partitions to image files
Restore images to the same or a different drive
While I personally have never dumped disk content to USB, I think this should be ok.
Run DriveImage from our Runtime Live CD or a WinPE ...
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Any live Linux CD can do this. They are both free, and open source. Ubuntu and Knoppix are probably the two most popular.
The dd command can create a copy of a hard drive and save it to a file:
dd if=/dev/hda of=/path/to/image
Where /dev/hda is the hard drive you want to copy.
To restore from the image:
dd if=/path/to/image of=/dev/hda
You do need to ...
3
Western Digital Passport external USB drives use hardware encryption, no need to use software. Here's a 3TB one from Amazon for $120usd. But beware, if the drive breaks you won't be able to get the data back, no one will.
1TB and 2TB of this line normally don't need an external power supply but larger ones might. I have 2 of them, a 1TB and 2TB.
I also ...
3
The Linux System Rescue CD can be burnt onto a CD or USB drive and when booted from offers lots of tools to repair your system, (even if it is a windows system).
Includes partition editing tools, (GParted & GNU Parted)
sfdisk and
TestDisk which can:
Fix partition table, recover deleted partition
Recover FAT32 boot sector from its backup
Rebuild FAT12/...
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You can use LUKS encryption for your external hard drive.
Anytime you plug in the drive, Ubuntu automonts the drive and directly asks for the password. Showing you an option when to forget it:
immediately
at the end of the session
never
--> looks like this:
Unlock dialog (source: gnu-designs.com; click image to enlarge)
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anyway... in general i would advise to use DBAN (or it's unofficial fork dban) to wipe complete disks:
it would be the universal method because it works from it's own bootable iso, is therefor platform independent, also free (as in speech and beer),... you only need to create a bootable media (CD, DVD, USB, etc.) and start from it.
an interesting option ...
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You can ask Windows to re-detect the drive type by running "winsat features" and it should enable/disable the Windows' built-in defragmenter based on what you are currently using.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc742091.aspx
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You can use WipeFreeSpace which runs on linux. Supports various filesystems including FAT32 (Win98).
You have to pass trough manual building process, as there is no binary...
Or you can use hacers tool THC-SecureDelete.
For firs try I do recommend you to backup all the data first, so therefore tar the data to another disk and wipe whole disk and tar it ...
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You can use hdparm, dd, bonnie++, fio, iozone or orion to benchmark your disk on Linux. All these programs are free and open source. See How can I benchmark my HDD?, I/O Performance Benchmarking Linux, and Linux File System Read Write Performance Test for information on how to use them.
answered Dec 31 '15 at 19:01
Franck Dernoncourt
34.4k23 gold badges95 silver badges201 bronze badges
2
Assuming that, you want to delete partitions manually.
I haven't tried EFI but Paragon Backup & Recovery has bios and EFI ISO's which you can create under Windows.
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Here is another alternative cloning software which is free and can do things you asked: CloneZilla.
You can make a bootable CD or USB Flash drive, boot into it and clone one drive to another one. All your original files will be transferred over. Then disconnect your old drive and boot with your new one.
You will need to use "device to device" cloning ...
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You can use BitTorrent Sync to share and access data directly from another PC, or even a mobile (Not through cloud). It supports Windows and Mac, unfortunately not Linux. You can use it in Android, Windows Phone, iOS also. No file size limit. And it's free.
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A. In OS X, enable NTFS write on the drive.
You do not need anything more (ie drivers).
There are some excellent instructions on osxdaily.com.
Michael Dreher points out in the comments of the preceding osxdaily.com link:
(referring to this source code)
We only allow read/write mounts if the "nobrowse" option was also
given. This is to ...
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Acronis True Image might be something for you. I'm using it since years and it works fine.
it costs ~40 EUR
it can exclude folders from the backup (see screenshot below, sorry it's German)
you can start backups manually
saves in TIB file format, which is a True Image proprietary format.
supports Windows 7 through Windows 10 (they even list XP, but that ...
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If they are truly identical, i.e. same hardware, etc., then possibly the easiest process is to install but do not register, Windows on a single machine - you can even install additional software, install your linux image & grub making a note of all of the patition details to get dual boot working.
Then boot that machine from a cloning tool such as ...
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I like Ariolic Disk Scanner; it is free and provides read verification with a visual map of the disk showing any bad clusters. It doesn't do repairs, but that was not part of your requirements. You can see this and some other free disk scanners here.
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You want a system cloning tool like Clonezilla. You'll need space off of your source disk to save the dump to, and you'll need to boot a VM with a clonezilla disk and access the dump you saved in order to write it back out to the VM's hard drive. You also may or may not need to do the equivalent of sysprep on it to deal with hardware changes, etc. Of ...
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I would personally use VirtualBox fuse. It allows you to attach VHD images on Linux, this way you can mount VHD images on both Windows inbuilt support and also Linux using this package.
Here's a guide that will provide step by step instructions on how to install and use VirtualBox fuse, Mounting VHD Image file in Linux
VirtualBox FUSE
VirtualBox is a ...
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One application that you might find useful is called NeoFinder. It does pretty much what you describe. It "catalogs" your disks, generating a database with information about each file and folder, which you can then search for any parameter you can imagine, even if the disk itself is offline.
NeoFinder even throws in thumbnails for photos and movies, gets ...
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