Its seems there are still no warning or signs for PC crashes.  Whether you are using a home PC or running a server, a system restore tool is simply a must to help fix crashes.  Although backup is good and serves as a prevention, system restoration serves as a cure for these untimely crashes that may wipe out your precious data in a single moment.  Luckily there are free tools out there to help to restore your system back to normal.   Since there are so many tools out there, Jason Fitzpatrick at Lifehacker.com have round up the five best free system restore tools mostly favored by Lifehacker readers for your choosing and making life much easier.  Check out these tools, not in order of most favor.

1. Macrium Reflect Free – comes with a built in scheduler and CD/DVD packet writing engine and allows imaging to network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD.  This baby only for home PCs loaded with XP or Vista.  The paid version supports server backup and incremental backup – ouch!  It restores your system or files to any location you desire.

2. DriveImageXML – create images on the fly in XML format which can be used on 3rd party tools.   Serves as backups and restores entire volumes for XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003 but does not have a built in scheduler though you may use Task Scheduler in Windows.

3. Paragon Drive Backup – allows backup to network, USB, FireWire drives and DVD and does live backup.  Does recovery for entire hard drive or specific files and even able to create bootable CD or DVD  or USB flash drive.

4. ImageX – able to add, copy, paste and delete files in the image files from Windows Explorer like any other normal Window directory.  This was meant for large company use i.e. mass deployment at bullet speed.  Speeds was the essence although no friendly UI but you’ll survive if you are a Lifehacker or Mymobile88 reader .

5. Clonezilla – This is the cover all OS backup tools.  Serves as a backup and recovery tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux based PCs.  Two different edition, the live and server edition(SE).   The live edition backup and restore 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS by saving and restoring used blocks in partitions.  There is even a sector-to-sector copy for any other unsupported file system. Multicast or multi cloning are supported in SE.

Before you leave do post your thoughts on comment section and for the system restore tool you think is the best to have.

Five Best System Restore Tools [via Lifehacker]

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