Download Download balenaEtcher Portable 1.10.6 / 1.10.19 Pre-release Free

as a portable counterpart ballet etcher (etching machine), balenaEtcher Portable is a free, open-source utility designed to safely and quickly burn images to SD cards and USB drives, including bootable Windows images. It has a user-friendly interface and only needs three steps to complete the task.

Since no installation is required, the tool can be stored on an external device so that it can be launched seamlessly on any PC to burn images. Also, it does not create extra files on disk or make registry modifications.

Intuitive image burner for SD cards and USB drives

The interface of balenaEtcher is modern and attractive, displaying three buttons for each necessary step. You can start by selecting an image file from your hard drive, whether it’s IMG, ISO, ZIP, or another format. Otherwise, it may not be recognized as bootable by removable drives if it doesn’t have a partition table.

In the next stage, you can choose your preferred drive to burn the image to. balenaEtcher automatically detects all removable drives, and if you plug two or more into your PC at the same time, it displays a list where you can see the description and free space to help you decide which one to plug in and which.

Configuration settings, such as switching to unsafe mode

The last step means just clicking “Flash!” to trigger the burn operation. button. This operation may take a while, depending on the size of the image and your PC’s hardware specifications.

There are several settings that can be configured for this application. For example, balenaEtcher defaults to ejecting the external drive when the task is successful. But you can disable this option and prevent the tool from verifying writes on success. There is also an unsafe mode available, but it’s not clear what that means. The only thing mentioned is that if you don’t know what you are doing you could end up overwriting the system drive.

Had some functionality issues in our tests

When the task completes, it doesn’t open Windows Explorer to show the results, so you’ll have to do that yourself. In addition to Windows, balenaEtcher can also be installed on Linux, macOS, and any platform supported by Electron.

Unfortunately, in our tests, the application was unsuccessful in several cases when trying to burn normal IMG files as well as bootable and non-bootable Windows ISOs. Although it didn’t signal any errors, balenaEtcher made the USB flash drive unreadable, forcing us to format it every time. It seems to have some stability issues that must be addressed. However, it has great potential to be a reliable USB image recorder.