We covered Windows backup software before at Ghacks but never before a portable software that could backup partitions and hard drives.

ODIN, which stands for Open Disk Imager, is a portable Open-Source backup software that can backup partitions and hard drives with the exception of the system partition. It is currently available in a very early beta which should not be used in a productive environment.

The hard drive backup software is able to backup or restore data. The current version is easy to use. Backing up data basically involves picking a drive letter or physical drive, selecting a location to store the hard drive image, optionally changing a few parameters and hitting the start button.

The options provide access to a few interesting settings like turning on gzip or bzzip2 compression, splitting data into chunks or saving only used or all blocks of the partition or physical drive.

Restoring an image is as straightforward and easy. The user has to pick the partition or physical drive and select the image that should be restored.

The hard drive backup software has a few limitations which probably will be removed in later builds of the software. The inability to create a backup of the system partition is probably the biggest.