ODIN

After a long usage time, any kind of hardware component can get damaged, especially your hard disk drive. Although there are many utilities which aim to recover files from damaged drives, they might not work in all situations. It’s best to have a backup at hand, and you can create one for entire partitions, or drives with ODIN.

The application doesn’t even need to be installed on your computer for things to work out, giving you the possibility to take it with you on a thumb drive to use on other computers as well. Apart from a great deal of flexibility, portability also means that system registries don’t need to be modified, thus keeping the target PC clean.

The visual design is pretty minimalistic, with all features stored in plain sight. Accommodation is a walk in the park, even for inexperienced individuals. All detected drives, and partitions are stored in a list, letting you easily select the one of interest. If you just decided to plug in a USB flash drive, it’s almost instantly detected, and added to the list of targets.

With support for NTFS, and FAT file system, you’re free to target just about any kind of storage device. Don’t worry, because content is not damaged during the backup operation. A save location needs to be selected, but make sure there’s enough space.

There are several options regarding what exactly to save. For instance, the resulting image file can be split into chunks of custom size, or even compressed with GZip, or BZip2 to take up less space. Moreover, you can choose to save only used blocks, all blocks, or the entire drive while also taking a snapshot.

Files are saved under the IMG file format, and the process speed only depends on the size, and read speed of the target drive. There’s a progress slider, and timer to let you know how much you need to wait. Restoring a backups functions in a similar manner, and you only need to switch from a dedicated set of controls.

All things considered, we come to the conclusion that ODIN is a powerful drive backup solution which is sure to keep your data safe. Although there aren’t any options to set up a schedule, or to have your computer shut down when the operation is complete, portability, supported file systems, and general size and compression options make it worth your while.