Looking for free and friendly imaging software or another solution

[Spr0ut]

Hey Kids! I'm useless and havent been able to find software to image drives to my satisfaction ( speed, reliability, user friendly etc) and I am at the point where im thinking about getting a toaster and just cloning drives. Would a toaster and an adapter for the M.2 drives that I primarily work with what I'm trying to do? I have 50~ thinkpads on the road with sales people that come in from time to time and rather than do all the fus about writing an img and windows etc id just track windows keys and clone drives and update the key.

 

Can someone tell me why this is a bad idea and if its not how to I sell this to MGMT?

 

Im somewhat solo in IT and im in way over my head.

[The_Prycer]

I just clone drives with Puppy linux because I'm too lazy to find imaging software and Puppy will run on basically anything.

[Radium_Angel]

18 minutes ago, Spr0ut said:

Im somewhat solo in IT and im in way over my head.

I use Norton GHOST (version 2003) takes about 15 minutes to clone a drive. Even my ancient 2003 version handles nVME and SSD drives with no issues.

Very user friendly and simple to operate.

[GoldenSound]

Personally I've always used Macrium Reflect.
Free for personal use, super flexible and powerful. Great piece of software

[Kisai]

It, really depends on the end goal.

 

If you are intending to mass-deploy an operating system, you are better off doing the work and setting up a slipstreamed operating system image and just letting it install so that each system is setup and personalized by the end user and doesn't accidentally violate the license of something.

 

If you're intending on experimenting (eg, benchmarks) where you want the same byte-for-byte drive image used on all the targets, then you should just use the Linux DD command. 

 

There is another variation, which I'll just call the "thin client" deployment, and this simply PXE boots off a server and pulls it's own "disk" image over the network upon boot, or installs itself onto the local disk, whichever is the intended effect. Windows XP/7/10 are all under 8GB, so if you download a bootloader and then mount the installation "drive", you can just make as many copies as you need by plugging your target machines into the same server or a switch connected to the server. This is in fact the kind of thing you would do in a college/university computer lab, or an internet cafe so that you can just update the OS image and then reboot the client machines to get a new clean install free of any crap the users/players might have installed on it.

 

In an Enterprise environment, of course you'd just do what I stated in the first paragraph, and deploy a slipstreamed image.

 

With MacOS X, FreeBSD and Linux, you can just clone the drive without any other installed software and you're good to go with DD. With Windows you can only do this with OEM machines that have the OS License key in the DMI. So you can't do this with retail versions by design.

 

I would be wary of using drive cloning tools with SSD and NVMe SSD's only because the tools are not SSD aware, so these tools will in fact overwrite empty space with empty space, which is why most vendors would rather lean towards a form of slipstreamed "reinstall" rather than "disk image", since it's much less wear on the SSD than overwriting every byte on the drive, or installing a retail disc image and then having to update it possibly multiple times.