Within OSX, two great drive cloning utilities are available; SuperDuper and CCC. I'm looking for an equivalent within the Windows world. Utilities such as Ghost, Acronis, and Clonezilla initially look promising, but from what I can tell don't support cloning an active boot drive.
Also, the Mac utilities allow the clone show up as a true clone, not an image file. So, if I plug the backup into a new computer, I'm able to boot from the backup and get my exact environment.
Are there any utilities available for Windows that mimic the functionality provided by SuperDuper and CCC for active boot drives? (meaning, not having to boot from a CD or other disk to back up)
Edit: Thanks everyone, I've decided to try out Acronis to see if it works the way I expect. If not, will move onto Ghost.
I can confirm that Acronis TrueImage also supports cloning an active boot drive.
Ghost (I used version 14) supports the cloning of an active boot drive. In fact, I just used it yesterday to do such a thing.
Technically you could use
dd.exefrom within Cygwin but anything you use from inside a running copy of Windows will be in an unreliable state (as if you didn't shut down). I've usedddon "live" linux machines in the past, however I've always remounted the disk read-only before imaging. You really need to dump a shadow copy rather than the live disk and that's more of a programming exercise than a sysadmin solution :)Under Vista and Server 2008, you can use CompletePC to do what you're trying to do.