I had been looking for something to make a Windows partition portable since I first loaded Boot Camp on my Mac. Windows installation is always painful. The thought of having to sit through that process whenever I needed to move/resize partitions is not appealing by any means.

I heard of Winclone by accident but didn't hesitate to download it and try it. It is now possible to backup & restore a Windows partition in a much less painful manner. Once you have installed Widnows once, Winclone allows you to backup and restore that partition on a different partition or even a different computer.

It does want the partition that is being restored to be at least as big as the original, even if most of the disk space in the source partition was unused. If you can't create a partition big enough to hold the image created, there is a shrink partition utility available that will shrink the image to just a little larger than the actual used file space. This makes it possible to actually size a partition down to what is needed. Nice touch!

For features and utility I give this program high marks. My only complaint would be the amount of time that the save/restore process can take. I imaged 144Gb from a 300Gb partition. The image creation took somwhere between 8-10 hours. Restoring that partition took about 8 hours. This is not a great time saving, but it is WAY better than spending that time configuring Windows and the applications that are running under it...