Free drive imaging and recovery software from Western Digital
I don’t know if it will work with Windows 7, but Western Digital is currently offering its Acronis True Image drive cloning tool as a free download. This looks like excellent software with many of the features you would want for backing up your files and OS before a migration or for a quick restore after a drive failure. From the Western Digital site:
Key Features of Acronis True Image WD Edition Software:
- Drive Cloning – Copies the source drive to a new WD drive, leaving all data on the source drive.
- Drive Migration – Erase the source drive after the new WD drive has been imaged.
- Drive Deployment – Enables users to prepare a WD drive so that selected folders or partitions can be excluded from the destination image.
- Drive Image Backup – The long-term usage of the Drive Kit software will be to provide full drive image backups of a source drive at any time. Backup drive images will be stored as a file, which can be copied to any direct attached drive, network attached storage drive or optical media (CD/DVD).
- Drive Image Recovery – The Recovery Manager enables users to restore a drive image from a direct or network attached drive. The Recovery Manager can also either erase just a portion of the drive to be used for the restored drive image, or all of the previous OS.
- Create a Bootable Standalone Recovery Manager – With the Drive Kit software, users can create a bootable ISO image file, which contains the WD Drive Kit Standalone Recovery Manager software.
- Recover a Drive Image from the Bootable Recovery Manager Software – The bootable Standalone Recovery Manager enables users to recover a drive image from either a CD/DVD drive, a direct attached drive, or a network attached drive.
