Notebooks these days are not coming with optical disk drives anymore as they are considered older technology. And the operating system companies like Microsoft and Ubuntu have adapted to this change by starting to provide the operating system on bootable USB pen drives. But these pen drives do not last as long as the older CD/DVD storage used to. In order to safe guard your data on the USB pen drives containing costly software against accidental data corruption, you should create a backup of the disks using a free software like the HDD Raw Copy.
HDD Raw Copy is a low level duplication utility for almost all types of storage media like HDD, SSD, SD, MMC, USB stick, and so on. As you launch the utility, you have to select a source which can be a disk drive attached to your system or a backup RAW file containing the byte-by-byte duplication of a disk. If you are creating a backup, then you should select one of the disks as the source. If you are restoring from a previous RAW image backup, then you should select a backup file as the source.
Next, you have to select the target where HDD Raw Copy is going to duplicate the contents of the source. You can select either a target disk drive for cloning the source. Or you can select a file as the target so as to create a byte-by-byte dump of the source disk.
As you click on the Start button, HDD Raw Copy goes to the work right away and starts to copy all the bytes from the source to the target. You are shown a complete progress along with the data transfer rate and the number of sectors written. The process is finished in a matter of minutes and by this time you should have created a backup of a disk, restores a disk from backup or cloned a disk.
Conclusion: HDD Raw Copy is a very simple low level disk cloning utility. It can be used to create the true byte-by-byte RAW backup disk images of your disks containing your important data. You can later restore your disks from this RAW disk image files using the same software.
You can download HDD Raw Copy from http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/.