balenaEtcher
Writes an OS image to a USB stick or SD card, verifies every byte, and refuses to target your hard drive.
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3 more ways to get balenaEtcher
Other download sites
Run by third parties, not by Balena. Prefer the official page above when it works.
About balenaEtcher
Etcher does one job: take an ISO or IMG and write it to removable media. It hides drives that look like system disks so you cannot wipe your own machine by misreading a drop-down, and it reads the card back after writing to confirm every byte landed correctly.
It also flashes Raspberry Pi boards directly when they are in USB device boot mode. The program is an Electron app, which makes it large for what it does, and recent versions ask about optional analytics on first run.
Strengths
- Hides system drives, so the classic wrong-disk accident is much harder
- Verifies the write by reading the media back
- Flashes Raspberry Pi boards over USB device boot mode
- Windows, macOS Intel and Apple Silicon, and Linux
Limitations
- An Electron app doing a job a 200 KB tool could do
- No persistent storage or multi-boot; one image per stick
- Asks about optional analytics on first run
- Windows 10 and later, Intel 64-bit only
Details
- Pricing
- FreeFree and open source under the Apache 2.0 licence. Balena sells separate commercial device management products.
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Developer
- Balena
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS, Linux
- How it runs
- Downloadable app
- Account
- Not required
- Works offline
- Yes
- Best suited for
- Writing one bootable image to one USB stick without destroying the wrong drive
- Categories
- Disk tools
- Last verified
- Added
- Provenance
- Selected from the TechWalrus downloads catalog (Disk & USB); facts checked against the developer's own pages, 2 sources on file.
Similar software
Related functionality, not necessarily a direct replacement.
