Despite concerns, free hard drive cloning software is perfectly capable of getting a drive copy accomplished as well as any licensed drive cloning software. There are free hard drive cloning software programs that can be downloaded from various sources on the internet. These free programs are often community developed and open source, meaning that anyone is free to use and modify them as they desire. Programs like this can grow and become quite refined and effective over time as they are tweaked and enhanced by the user community.
There are few differences between paid for and free hard drive cloning software. The paid for software often can be centrally managed by a single server, but that server is often quite costly to license and put in to place. As useful as one may be, the costs simply are not practical for some and the little extra work required to image a machine using free hard drive cloning software is totally worth the savings and the time not spent building the solution into a server platform.
There are also greater support options with a paid drive cloning solution, but when considering that a free hard drive cloning software runs primarily from a command line and is a stand alone piece of software that only requires interaction with the hard disk controller and system chip sets and no other drivers, there is little that typically is required in the way of support. The free hard drive cloning software does not necessarily get installed to the computer, skirting common operating system and compatibility problems. The free hard drive cloning software boots, performs the work you need to your hard drives, be it creating image files or disk to disk cloning, and does so typically reliably and free of complications that are precipitated by more complex software packages.