SelfImage

[Jeremy]

SelfImage is the little hard drive utility with big aspirations.

SelfImage is capable of making an image file of a hard disk

or hard disk partition, and can restore an image back to any

drive or partition that doesn't have open files. Useful for

making backups. Unlike dd for Windows (or cygwin),

SelfImage is capable of creating an image of a partition that

is currently in use.

Additionally, when run on Windows 2000 or XP, SelfImage

can create images of partitions that Windows doesn't even

recognize or have mounted on a drive letter. Perfect for the

dual-boot system, you can create an image backup of a Linux

partition directly from Windows.

Features include:

1. Create 1:1 image files of any mounted (or unmounted on Windows 2000/XP) hard disk partition.

2. Can create an image of an entire hard disk, including the master boot record, partition table, and all partitions (Windows 2000/XP)

3. Restore previously created images to any partition, even mounted ones, as long as it doesn't have open files.

4. On-the-fly compression accelerated with parallel CPU support to take advantage of today's hyperthreaded, multi-core and SMP systems.

5. Skip reading a disk's "free space", treating it as if it were zero. This decreases the size of a compressed image and makes it process MUCH faster.

5a. NEW Version 1.2.0 can now do this for Linux ext2/ext3 partitions as well.

5b. NEW Available as an experimental BartPE plugin for use in boot/rescue CDs.

6. Network Block Device support to make images of disks on remote machines, and restore back to them.

7. Multi-threaded design for maximum throughput and low CPU overhead.

8. It's free software - free as in cost, and free as in open source - released under the GNU General Public License.

I originally saw this over at NeoWin. It's a 450 KB portable executable.

When I open it, it takes about 2 seconds to "enumerate" my partitions.

The GUI (which IMHO is just fine) is basic:

You can backup a file, an entire HDD/partition, or "NBD"

(Network Bootable something?). You can either use no compression

and have the image written as .img. If you use compression, you

are given 3 options: gzip (fast), gzip (best) and bzip2.

Here are the preferences:

When I specified that I wanted to make a backup of my C: (active partition)

onto my D: and use the best compression, it warned me:

WARNING:

The input for this image is larger than the available space on the

destination volume. Input size is 149.040GB, available space is

28.950GB. You will need to obtain a compression ratio of 5.1:1

for this to fit. This amount of compression is extremely unlikely

unless the source is mostly empty space that has been properly

erased. Unless this is the case, you will almost certainly run out

of disk space if you continue.

Are you SURE you want to continue?

I clicked Yes and it started creating the backup. It is slower than

Acronis but I'm not that impatient. For it to read 149 GB took about

10 minutes.

It tells you how much data is read, how much of that is skipped

free space, how much has been written to the image file, the speed

(in real-time) at which it reads the data and the average speed overall.

Here's the process, CPU, Memory and Virtual Memory usage:

All in all, this program is impressive. It's about time people took

more interest in providing others with freeware/open source alternatives

for the commercial products we usually swear by. Granted it has its bugs

and lack of other features, but all in good time. This is something I'm

definitely going to keep my eye on.

Homepage

[bj-kaiser]

looks interesting. Do you know if it has commandline options (for scripting)?

[jaclaz]

If you are interested in this kind of apps, you can find some more similar ones here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16534

Particularly, nfgdump has full command line support and has some really nice features.

jaclaz

[albator]

tHank for the info, I will wait for a version with a boot disk (as annonced on the software website) . Because for now you cannot use it on a active partition...

Edited April 8, 2007 by albator

[cyprids]

tHank for the info, I will wait for a version with a boot disk (as annonced on the software website) . Because for now you cannot use it on a active partition...

You can fairly easy add selfimage to WinPE. I did it to my WinPE 2.0 image and it is nothing more than copying the selfimage files to WinPE during its creation...

[Woomera]

...It's a 450 KB portable executable.

Looks to me its just an interface to the original backup tool of windows ,dont know maybe im wrong