GIVE ME A GUI!
We’re the first to admit that Clonezilla isn’t the prettiest thing to look at, nor the easiest in terms of understanding what it’s asking you half the time. In the past, both www.easeus.com and www.
macrium.com have offered solid free imaging tools, and certainly sell excellent commercial solutions.
If you’re looking for a free option, Macrium Reflect Free Edition is probably your best bet. Once installed—there’s an initial 5MB installer download, followed by a 800MB main download—you can simply select “Backup > Windows,” and it backs up your full boot drive (boot, Windows, and recovery partitions) in a simple fashion. It also supports differential backups, so once the main imaging is finished, further backups take much less time.
Unlike Clonezilla, which has to be run off a bootable device, you need to create a recovery disc with Macrium Reflect. You can do this if your system fails to boot, but it’s more useful to have the system in place beforehand. This is done via “Other Tasks > Rescue Media Wizard,” and Macrium calls it a Windows PE rescue environment. Click “Change PE Version” to see the issue with older versions of Windows; effectively, Windows 10/8.1/8/7/ Vista/XP need different versions to work, which complicates restoring older versions.