Comparison of System Backup solutions

We couldn’t leave out PartImage, which is an Open Source Linux utility limited to backing up all of your drives or partitions to a created image file. Of course, other free utilities exist, but we have chosen to look at Part Image which is one of the more interesting.

Incremental backups are not supported, and before launching a restore you will need to create the partitions. The image can be stored on all kinds of devices, external included, segmented into multiple files so that they can be stored on CD/DVD ROMS or compressed with the Gzip or Bzip2 formats. It is even possible to backup to a server across the network. Even though PartImage supports a wide range of file systems, NTFS is not completely guaranteed yet. If the backup of an NTFS partition poses some problems, you may have to defrag the partition before trying the operation again. The most surprising thing was that all the hardware was perfectly recognised by the program. It is a shame that PartImage doesn’t have a more intuitive graphical interface, but it is still very simple to use.