Creating full Windows backup by imaging using Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, Macrium Reflect etc is pretty common for advance computer users. When your system is corrupted and unable to boot, all you need to do is just boot up the computer with the imaging software, locate the image and it will automatically restore your system back to the time when you created the image.
Usually imaging is created for the whole hard drive or partition but not a few files or folders. Problem with some imaging software such as Macrium Reflect is it doesn't allow creating images for USB flash drive or MP3 players. Although the space in USB Flash drives and MP3 players is not as big as computer hard drives, it'd still be nice to create a full backup of it and then saving it as single image file.
Here is a free tool which you can use to create images of USB memory sticks and MP3 players.
USB Image Tool can create images of USB memory sticks and MP3 players, that are mounted as USB drives. It allows you switch between images with different music styles on your MP3 Player or to make an exact backup image of your USB Stick.
USB Image Tool Features:
create image files of USB drives restore images of USB drives compressed image file format show USB device information manage favorite USB images
I've tried creating a full image backup on my 2GB Kingston DataTraveler USB flash drive using USB Image Tool. It took about 3 minutes to create a non-compressed full backup .img file. As for a compressed image file, it took longer because of the time taken to compress the .img file to .imz. USB Image Tool uses XZip 1.3 compression routines based on Info-ZIP. XZip 1.3 by Lucian Wischik, Hans Dietrich. If you have a 2GB USB flash drive and you've only used up to 900MB of the space, the uncompressed backup image file size will still be around nearly 2GB. Reason is it copies everything on your USB flash drive including the empty space.
USB Image Tool requires the .NET Framework 2.0 and runs on Windows XP/Vista. Please take note that Windows 2000 is not supported. The usbit32.dll included in the archive must be in the same directory as the EXE file.
[ Download USB Image Tool ]