Long ago I used a commercial program called Nero to copy discs of almost any type. It had a super-useful feature of being able to create a standalone bootable CD/DVD, such that a brand new machine could be brought to life using a single optical disc (you gave it a bootable image of DOS which it loaded into a boot sector, and that allowed you to load enough drivers to get the maching moving). Sadly, Nero stopped working and I never needed to replace it... until now.
I recently realized that while I have a few decent laptops around, I'd be in a world of discomfort if my primary workstation were to fail. I built it in 2012 so it's getting up there in years. Thus I'm building a second "backup" workstation that will become my primary box, with my current machine becoming the backup. This also gives me an opportunity to refresh my hardware to the latest that officially supports Win7 (Skylake) and thus gain access to M.2 drives, etc. (Please do not turn this thread into a "Windows version" argument, there are enough of those threads already.)
Once this box is built, I want to clone my existing SSD's and spinning drives onto the M.2's. Thereafter it would also be nice to regain the ability to copy optical discs (the main reason I have dual optical drives in my machines) and create self-booting optical discs.
I've seen recommendations for DDRescue but it appears to be more of a data recovery tool, not a cloning/copying tool. Ideally the tool will be able to do clones, copies by partition to manage changes in partition sizes between the source and target devices, etc.
I love "free" but am willing to pay <$100 for a commercial product if the price is justified.
Thanks!