I've used 'dd' and 'clonezilla'. With dd, the backup can be to a file which can be mounted as a file system, and accessed just like a drive partition. Clonezilla doesn't do that. But both restore to a bootable state. Dd can also be Piped through gzip or bzip2 to compress the image, and can be then piped through netcat to perform cloning over a local network, or over the internet. The clone bit stream can be piped through ssh for encryption over public channels.
The clone can be streamed to a Luks container, which, when closed, renders the clone encrypted. Images can be made on ftp severs, nfs volumes, samba shares, cifs volumes, UFS volumes, lvs2 volumes, raid arrays, flash media, over USB, TO flash readers, loopback devices, sparse files that grow only to the size required to hold the image, ramdrives, M.2 drives, and the following file systems, from any to any: UFS, XFS, ZFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, CIFS, NFS, CRAMFS, LogFS, UBIFS, Minix, NTFS, FAT16, FAT32, EXFAT, HFS, btrfs, tmpfs, ramfs, and others.
Dd is the reference data-processing standard for imaging since the 1970s. It has been use billions of times without error, and it is assumed in courts of law, without further qualification, to produce an exact duplicate of the data it copies.
Proprietary solutions have a big problem with increasing drive capacities. They all use file systems developed 'in house', many of which have serious limitations. So, very large files need to be split, compression algorithms choke on the sheer volume of data, only a few restore position-dependent files to the sectors they originally occupied relative to the partition table, the file systems are poorly tested for scalability, they contain no error checking or parity, so it must be done as the data is read, written, and then read again.
Users will always have failures using proprietary image backup solutions. But there are some standouts. Handy Backup, Symantec Ghost, and Acronis True Image. Handy Backup is feature rich and cheap, but not free.
Ordinarily, if you restore Windows 7, 8 or 10 to a different disk, it doesn't boot.
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