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 storage media for backups, system copies, and recovery of defective media. It works independently of partitioning scheme, file system, and operating system, including with some otherwise inaccessible proprietary formats. Depending on edition, it supports drive and partition copies, SmartCopy, PartitionSelect, and copying to multiple targets. File-image options vary by edition, with higher editions adding compression, password protection, differential or encrypted images, and virtual disk formats. Professional and Enterprise editions can create VMDK, VHD, VHDX, and VDI images for VMware, VirtualPC, and VirtualBox virtual machines. It runs as a Windows application or from bootable CD/DVD or USB media. The Free Edition costs nothing, for private use only, and is limited to 4 TB and 70 MB/s. Basic costs €19.90, paid once and is limited to private use on up to two PCs; higher one-time editions add further capabilities.