A Portable, Bootable Application To Image PCs?

[CerealExperimentsLain]

I'm pretty sure this is 'a thing', and my Google Fu is just failing me, I'm looking for the wrong terms or something.  Anyway I'm looking for a portable bootable piece of software that can just image a computer.  You boot the USB hard drive to some Live build of Linux or something, then you can just use it to make images of any drives of the system it booted or restore images to the drive.  Now, I'm sure there are Live CD builds of Linux and I can just use it as a general OS to run a bunch of tools, ect.  But I'm hoping for something a little more purpose built and idiot proof.

 

So I could say, plug it into a laptop, or a Steam Deck, or even a retro PC that boots USB, boot that, I can dump the main drive to an image on the external drive, and restore from that image later if I want.

 

Surely this exists, right?

[RONOTHAN##]

Clonezilla can do exactly this. 

[Needfuldoer]

There's Clonezilla, but it's kind of annoying to use.

https://clonezilla.org/

https://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php

 

Macrium has a free cloning tool available with a bootable live image, but I haven't tried it myself.

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

 

There are also various free OEM versions of Acronis True Image out there, but you need at least one component made by their branding partner for those to work. (An Asus board for the Asus version, a WD drive for the WD edition, etc.)

 

I built my own bootable Windows PE boot image with my old version of Symantec Ghost on it, it's been a staple of my tool kit for years.

[Kilrah]

Agree with Clonezilla being a pain, but Macrium has worked fine for me. I keep its boot image along a bunch of other tools on a Ventoy flash drive.

[wseaton]

For Windows stick to Windows based media because it's almost always Volume Shadow Copy based and this is *the* most robust way to clone windows based systems. Sick of hearing about clonezilla and using linux based tools to clone Windows. Rather pull out my floppy disks with DOS based Ghost.

 

Free edition of Macrium Reflect can create a USB recovery stick and even build drivers into them. I always keep a USB booter of Macrium reflet on my keychain along with Veeam recovery environment.