Back up your Windows PC for free with Clonezilla

A system image captures everything on a PC — operating system, settings, apps and user data — so you can restore a new machine to the exact state of the old one. Clonezilla is a free, lightweight Linux environment that boots from USB to create and restore these full-disk images for Linux, macOS or Windows systems.

There are some key requirements to note before you begin. Create a bootable Clonezilla USB drive. The destination machine must share the same CPU architecture as the source, and its drive must be the same size or larger. If your system uses UEFI Secure Boot, use the AMD64 (x86-64) Clonezilla live build.

To create an image, connect the external drive that will store the image and boot the machine from the Clonezilla USB. Choose device-image, then local_dev and select the external drive. Use Beginner mode, pick savedisk, give the image a name (adding the date is helpful), select the source disk, and choose a compression level (z1p for lower, z9p for higher compression; z9p is recommended on modern machines).

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