balena-io/etcher

Etcher is a desktop application for writing operating system images to SD cards and USB drives. The core problem it solves is making this process safe and foolproof: when you want to install Linux on a Raspberry Pi or create a bootable USB stick for a new OS installation, you need to write a disk image file byte-for-byte onto a physical storage device. Other tools can be confusing or allow you to accidentally overwrite your computer's internal hard drive if you select the wrong device, a potentially catastrophic mistake. Etcher guards against this with clear labeling and verification steps. The tool works by walking you through three straightforward steps: select the image file, select the target drive, and flash it. After writing, it automatically verifies that every byte was written correctly, giving you confidence the result is bootable. It also supports flashing Raspberry Pi devices that support USB device boot mode directly. The interface is intentionally simple and presents only appropriate target devices, preventing accidental writes to your main system disk. Someone would use Etcher when setting up a single-board computer like a Raspberry Pi, creating a bootable Linux USB drive to install or test an operating system, or preparing a device for an embedded computing project. Etcher runs on Windows, macOS (both Intel and Apple Silicon), and Linux. The application is built with TypeScript using Electron, a framework that packages web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) into a cross-platform desktop application. It is available via installers, package managers like apt, rpm, winget, and Chocolatey.