Clonezilla vs HDClone

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.

HDClone creates physical or logical copies and file images of hard disks and other mass-storage media. It works independently of partitioning schemes, file systems, and operating systems, including proprietary formats that might otherwise be inaccessible. For defective media, SafeRescue first skips damaged areas and then carries out the rescue operation. HDClone can make differential images containing changes to an original image, typically resulting in smaller files. Images can be optionally encrypted with AES and compressed, or saved in VMDK, VHD, VHDX, and VDI formats. Miray Virtual Disk can mount images, including VHDX and VDI, as Windows drives with read-only or writable access. HDClone supports Windows from XP through Windows 11, and an AppImage is available for Linux distributions. The self-booting package supports SecureBoot and includes boot-media creation setup for USB or CD/DVD. The free edition is for private use, supports up to 4 TB, and lists speeds up to 70 MB/s. Paid editions start at €19.90 once for Basic Edition.