Active@ Disk Image vs Relax-and-Recover
Active@ Disk Image
disk-image.comRelax-and-Recover
relax-and-recover.orgSide by side
| Figure | Active@ Disk Image | Relax-and-Recover |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 8 | 1 |
| Spec score · Disk Imaging Software | 8.5 (#9) | 8.1 (#13) |
| Purpose | The software makes an exact copy of PC disks and stores it as an image for backup, upgrades, duplication, or recovery. | ReaR creates bootable disaster recovery images for bare-metal recovery with data restore on physical or virtual replacement hardware. |
| Recovery media | The product includes a WinPE-based Active@ Boot Disk Lite component for restoring a PC system disk from bootable media. | Supported boot media include ISO, USB, eSATA, bootable tape, and PXE. |
| Support | The maker offers support requests, product FAQs, and phone support at +1 (877) 403-8082 and +1 (905) 812-8434. | Community support is offered through GitHub issues; the site also lists contributors offering professional services and says 24x7 contracts can be arranged through IT3 Consultants. |
Plans
Active@ Disk Image
- FreewareFree
- Professional TrialFree
- Personal Standard$49, paid once
- Business Standard$59, paid once
- Personal Professional$79, paid once
- Business Professional$109, paid once
- Enterprise Standard$2,795, paid once
- Enterprise Professional$5,499, paid once
In their own words
Active@ Disk Image
Active@ Disk Image creates disk images for PC backup, upgrades, duplication, and recovery. It can image occupied clusters or capture raw sectors, then restore those images. Its tools include compression, image verification, splitting files into chunks, and mounting an image as a virtual drive. Standard and Professional feature listings include incremental and differential images; scheduled backups and scripting are also listed. A WinPE-based Active@ Boot Disk Lite component provides bootable media for restoring a PC system disk. Destinations include hard drives, SSDs, removable USB media, optical disks, network shares, NAS, and AWS S3. Encryption options are AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256. Listed Windows support spans Windows 7 through 11 and Windows Server 2003 through 2022. Older Windows versions, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris for PC can be handled in Raw Disk Image mode after booting the recovery media. Freeware and a fully functional 21-day trial are listed. Personal Standard is $49, paid once; business and professional licenses have other listed prices.
Relax-and-Recover
Relax-and-Recover (ReaR) is a free, GPL-licensed Linux disaster-recovery framework from Relax-and-Recover, founded in 2006. It creates bootable recovery images for restoring systems to replacement physical or virtual hardware. The workflow rebuilds storage layouts, restores data through a backup program, and installs a boot loader. Recovery can be guided or fully unattended, including physical-to-virtual, virtual-to-physical, physical-to-physical, and virtual-to-virtual moves. Boot media includes ISO, USB, eSATA, bootable tape, and PXE. Built-in backup methods include tar and rsync, with integrations such as Bacula, Borg, Commvault, NetBackup, and Veeam. Supported storage technologies include RAID, LVM, multipathing, DRBD, iSCSI, and LUKS. ReaR is written in Bash with a modular design for extensions, and Disaster Recovery Linux Manager can centrally manage deployments. It must run as root, exposes no network services or ports, and version 2.9 was released in January 2025.