What is Dd for windows?
dd for Windows is a free and open-source disk cloning and imaging tool for Microsoft Windows. It is designed to be a Windows port of the dd utility available in Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
Just like the original dd, dd for Windows allows creating exact sector-by-sector disk images, either by copying entire disks/partitions or just selected parts of them. The images created by the tool are fully compatible with the standard dd images.
The key features and capabilities of dd for Windows include:
- Disk cloning - Creating 1:1 copies of entire disks or partitions
- Disk imaging - Backup disks/partitions by creating compressed images
- Data recovery - Restore disks or selected data from images
- Data wiping - Securely erase data from disks using various standards
- Supports major storage devices like hard drives, SSDs, USB drives, memory cards etc.
- Advanced features like hash/checksum validation, splitting images over multiple files etc.
Some of the common use cases of this disk imaging tool are: disk backup & restore, disk cloning & migration, forensics, data recovery, secure data wiping etc. It can be quite useful for system administrators, data recovery specialists, forensic analysts and IT professionals in general.