CloneDisk is a free and portable tool that can perform a number of operations on your storage devices. It can clone a disk, save the disk images, restore a disk from a disk image, manage volumes & partitions, create & attach virtual disks, create RAW disk images or ISO images and more. This tool runs on Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 and offers both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. Even though it supports so many features and functions, the download is only 2.5 MB in size.
You can download CloneDisk ZIP file and extract the contents to a folder, right-click on the EXE file and choose Run as administrator to launch it. The program should be run with administrator level privileges so that it can access the storage devices. Then you can select one of the disks or partitions to carry out the various operations on them.
The operations can be selected from the right-side. They are listed under various categories – Clone, Volume, Disk, Virtual Disk, and Disk Image. The Clone category offers you to clone the partitions, backup the partitions as images, backup them on network, and restore them later from the saved images. The Volume category offers checking disk, changing volume names, extend, shrink and format the volumes. Under the Disk category, you can create disk, create partitions, edit the partitions, set disks onlne or offline etc.
Under the Virtual Disk category, you can create or attach a VHD or ISO disk image. And under the Disk Image category, you can make a RAW disk image, create an ISO disk image or perform disk image conversions. Some of these operations cannot be performed right away from within Windows. They require your computer to be rebooted and then those operations are performed before Windows is loaded.
So is this small CloneDisk program any better than the paid commercial partition managers like EaseUS Partition Master or their free versions? Well the thing is those commercial software come with an easy to use and easy to understand interface. They also offer offline and online help on all topics. Moreover, you can contact the help support if you have any queries. But CloneDisk could be confusing for the novice and there is absolutely no help or explanation of the various features.
Conclusion: CloneDisk is feature loaded tool to manage storage disks, virtual disks and other disk images. But since there is no help provided, the users are on their own to figure out how and what all these functions do.
You can download CloneDisk from https://labalec.fr/erwan/?page_id=42.