This project - greenclone - provides Windows users with an alternative to robocopy and other command line tools for making copies of directory hierarchies in a form which is browsable and can be used for an exact restore.

The binary distribution is available as a zip file in the downloads section of this bitbucket repository.

The key features which distinguish greenclone from other similar tools are:

• Preserves symbolic links and junction points
• Restores hardlinks as hardlinks, so if your hierarchy contains two or more hardlinks to the same file, the destination will be the same
• Can optionally store permissions and AFS information in an auxiliary file, so backups don't lose information even if the destination is not NTFS ( useful for Linux NAS backups )
• Can optionally use VSS to make shadow copies
• Can use existing shadow copies or other arbitrary low-level windows paths ( things starting \\?\ in other words ).

To get started, just download the binary distribution, and unpack it to a location of your choice and run greenclone.exe

Take a look at the examples page for some ideas of how to use greenclone effectively.