Windows users have a wide assortment of backup apps and services at their disposal. Even Windows itself comes with options, but as usually, they lack when compared to professional tools.
MultiDrive is a new contender in the space. It is available as a portable or setup version, and you can use it to perform major disk operations, including backing up, cloning, erasing, or restoring. It is free, has no ads and no payments at the time of writing.
The software is easy to use. It displays the available tasks on the left side and in the main area information about all connected drives, the progress, and completed tasks.
Some configuration options are provided after selection. If you pick backup, you get to pick a format, file type and whether you want to split files or keep one massive file. One interesting option is the ability to pick the source drive range for the backup. You can keep it at “everything”, or pick a range on the drive. Other than that, there is an option to calculate a hash, which is great for verification purposes.
You may notice that you do not get as many options as in comparable backup tools. For example, there is no option to protect the backup with a password or to schedule backups from within the interface.
To get started, pick one of the available options:
- Backup: This backs up the entire drive to a single file or multiple files.
- Clone: Copy the contents of an entire drive to another, ideal for migrating to another hard drive.
- Restore: This restores previously created backups.
- Erase: Deletes data on a drive.
Other than that, you do get access to a command line interface tool and support for parallel operations. So, what can you actually use the software for? Here are some suggestions:
- Move all data to a new drive or create a backup drive.
- Erase all data on a drive or multiple drives before selling, recycling or giving it away.
- Back up USB Flash Drives.
A WinPE image is available for restoring backups. You need to download it from the developer website and put it on a bootable USB drive.
The program works well for what it does, but it lacks some options and preferences that other apps, including my favorite pick Paragon Backup & Recovery Community Edition, support. Considering that there is a big team behind the app, I’d guess that a premium version is on its way that will have some of these missing options. The developers promise, however, that everything that is free will remain free, even if a premium version is introduced in the future.
The mSATA on my old Z87 mobo started showing early signs of impending failure just a few weeks ago, so I picked up a patriot 2.5″ SSD.
I used Clonezilla and it worked perfectly. It even modified the boot sector automatically, since I was cloning the C:\ drive, and the PC fired up on the new hardware at next boot up.
Thank you, Martin! I’m excited to see I liked our MultiDrive!
We built it on a simple principle: key disk operations like cloning, erasing, backups should be completely free for all. I strongly believe in this.
We also wanted to make sure that the app was attractive and easy to use. Even my grandma could use it. Do your job and help people as much as you can without having to wait for pop-ups.
It would be nice if you would explain what features that it currently lacks, especially compared to Paragon so that we readers can decide which should we use or maybe even contact them so that they could consider implementing them.
It depends largely what you expect. If you want to create backup or clone jobs quickly, this is a contender. If you want more options, like password protection or mounting backups to restore individual files, this is not the one (yet).
Somewhat hard to view it as a real contender when it lacks encryption. Also, I didn’t see the ability to exclude files or directories. That’s a non starter as well. Perhaps encryption and other features are coming in a future update, but as is, this is just a very bare bones backup software in a very crowded field that includes FREE & OPENSOURCE software like Clonezilla,