USB Image Tool is a free utility written for Windows that can be used to create backup images of any USB device. Why is this useful? Well, as an example, not everyone has an iPod. Loading music on and off off a MP3 player is a time consuming process – if you are lucky you are using a peice of software that can assist in managing your music collection – similar to iTunes. As many USB based MP3 players are limited in their capacity, you may not be able to fit multiple moods of music on the device at once. If you have a collection of tunes that you work-out to it’s quite likely different from the music you relax to. USB Image Tool would allow you to store snapshots of your MP3 device on your hard drive. Instead of resorting to Windows Explorer or other Library Managers to move music to and from the device, you could simply restore a workout image or a soothing image. More specific to my daily usage, I have a number of VMWare-like virtual environments that I boot  from off USB thumbdrives. This program is a perfect fit.

The software is a snap to use with just 3 buttons: backup, restore, or rescan. Backup and restore are obvious, but rescan will force the software to detect any connected USB device in case the software doesn’t see it at first. It had no problems detecting my iPhone or any of the thumbdrives I threw at it – however it did not detect my Motorola Razr, even after a rescan.

The image of the USB device is stored on your hard drive in a compressed format, suitable for backing up on DVD, or even restoring to another device. USB Image Tool is lightweight but does requires Microsoft .NET 2.0  Framework though you probably already have that installed as a requirement for other software. It works under XP and Vista alike.