Casper vs Clonezilla

Casper creates system backups for Windows PCs, including bootable point-in-time disk images. Those images can restore selected files or folders, or an entire system drive. Backups run from within Windows, while SmartClone differential block imaging creates incremental images and updates bootable backups. SmartSight checks before imaging, and automatic copy verification checks data during imaging. Users can schedule backups daily, weekly, monthly, or at a chosen frequency, and use automatic retention management. Casper also lists enterprise scripting and automation support and Group Policy administration. Its Secure Tech Edition is designed for disks encrypted with Windows BitLocker or Symantec (PGP) Drive Encryption. Restore-point and image-file backups require Windows 7 or later; SmartResume works only on NTFS volumes. Casper has a free plan and offers a fully functional 30-day trial; after that trial, it automatically reverts to Casper Free Edition. The platform is Windows. Home licenses include a one-computer license for 59.95 USD once and a five-PC pack for 89.95 USD once; technician licenses are also listed.

Clonezilla is a free, open-source program for imaging and cloning partitions and disks for system deployment, bare-metal backup, and recovery. Clonezilla live is suited to one machine; lite server and Clonezilla SE can clone many computers at once, with the site describing 40-plus computers. It saves and restores used blocks on supported file systems and uses sector-to-sector copying for unsupported ones. Listed file systems include Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, Minix, and VMware formats, including ext4, NTFS, APFS, and VMFS3/5. Images can be kept on a local disk or SSH, Samba, NFS, or WebDAV servers, and can be encrypted with AES-256. Clonezilla SE supports multicast, while lite server supports BitTorrent deployment. Clonezilla live supports BIOS or UEFI boot and MBR and GPT. It requires an x86 or x86-64 processor, 196 MB RAM, and a boot device. The destination partition must be at least as large as the source. Differential and incremental backups and online imaging are not implemented; images cannot be mounted or explored for direct individual-file recovery.