HOWTO: Clone Your Hard Drive - Comments Page 1

SuperDuper for the Mac is great and the basic version is free - the more advanced features can be purchased for around $30. Very easy to use.
XXXClone is a great program for PC's and is free (don't let the name put you off). Straight forward interface.

thank you; this is just what i needed to know at this time, as my 2007 toshiba 17" laptop seems about to 'give up the ghost' & wanted to back it before stop using it completely..

Thank you for very informative article. Recently I have clone one of my drive.

There are so many things I was not aware of but thanks to your article it is very precise and informative. Now I fully understand what to do and how to do.

Bob,

How about cloning software for Windows 8? I have a Win 8 desktop AND laptop. So far all I see is Win 7 listed as compatible. So far I have relied on real time backup of my thousands of photo images to my external HDD plus DVD's. The rest, like OS and programs are all rather easily reinstalled in case of disaster. So I think I'm fairly well protected against loss of important stuff....but having a image of the hard drive would be extra security for me.

I'm quite surprised you didn't mention Acronis True Image software. It does everything you mentioned, and more. For example, you have your choice of incremental backups or differential backups. Incrementals are the difference since the last backup of any kind and differentials are the difference since the last full image backup. I've been using True Image for many years and found that it works flawlessly, is easy to use, and is reasonably priced ($29.95).

Hi Bob,

I have had mixed luck cloning 2.5" SATA drives to upgrade laptop drives. Please see below an excerpt from my rating of the Apricorn SATAWireKit from Microcenter.com. http://microcenter.com/product/314223/SATAWire_Kit__-_25_SATA_Drive_to_USB_Adapter_Cable#
This software succeeded where others failed. It didn't seem difficult at first, as I was upgrading from 350 to 500GB of the same drive manufacturer. I'm not trying to denigrate either the Macrium (fantastically useful and solid for imaging) or the Easeus product, but this is the way it worked out for me:

"Attempts to clone several SATA notebook drives, including one SSD, failed with paid and "respected" pre-OS software Macrium Reflect and Easeus Partition Master. Seems a difference in "drive geometry" might have been the culprit.

This device and software combo did the trick every time! Not only that, it does not need to be run from a pre-OS CD. Although it can be run from a boot CD, it runs nicely within Windows (7 in my case), apparently creating a shadow volume copy snapshot before cloning.

If you have more than one partition on your HD, you can use custom settings to adjust partition sizes on the new drive before the clone, saving you the trouble and risks of doing it later.

I suspect that the USB adapter for a notebook drive may not be necessary, although it's an elegant one that beats the clunkiness of a generic USB to hard drive adapter. It's my guess that the software will work with any USB or internal drive recognized by the computer, IDE, SATA, or SSD, which makes the software itself a bargain.

I don't usually say "foolproof", but if this isn't, it's close."

You didn't even mention Acronis. Acronis mixes both. It does a disk image and then allows you to use it as a regular backup; even mount an image as a drive. It also does incremental backups to the image. It can even do it's magic WHILE windows is running which has to be very tricky indeed. It's about $50 for the current home/small office version.

I have only had occasion to do a full restore on one computer, but it went just fine. I've often mounted backups and retrieved older versions of files and such from them. You can also retrieve files from their interface, but I like the mount option.

I'm using REDO Backup & Recovery 1.0.4. It worked flawlessly after a reformat of a Windows 7 disk. Macrium Reflect Free wouldn't read the image it had copied to an external 1TB USB drive. My REDO image was on the same USB drive. Sure glad I had both because I have a ton of additional software.

I tried cloning a dual boot (XP and Linux Mint 9) boot disk with Clonezilla, but it wouldn't boot when installed after the clone. I found G4L and it worked perfectly. G4L is a boot CD that will make an exact copy of any disk on a PC (not Mac).

I have to agree with those above who are mentioning Acronis True Image. Good Software ... fairly easy to use ... inexpensive. I recently cloned a Win 7 laptop with it and it worked perfectly.

A couple of responses have recommended Acronis True Image. I used it successfully for several years but something changed in 'the system' two or three years ago (this happened on three PC's) and it turned into a disaster. And I was unable to go back to an earlier version. A look in the Acronis forums will show that many users have now become disillusioned - particularly with the quality and/or lack of support. Test drive first - and check the quality of the result before spending any money!

I've cloned several drives, as the older ones died or became too small, and also when I was building a set of PCs for my employer. The drive manufacturers offer free cloning software, Seagate and WD, which work on their drives and possibly others.
Acronis was good too, as I remember it also partitioned on the fly. I must have been lucky to have a free download - or maybe it was a trial version - because I hardly ever pay for software.
The last time I up-graded my HDD, I cleaned the old (too small) drive and installed a fresh bootable copy of XP, as a last resort to get my computer started the next time the boot disk fails.
Since then I have used cloning software once a year to copy my boot HDD as a back-up - I keep the program files on a separate drive/partition from the data files, so it is compact enough to clone quickly.
Good timing, your article, as I will soon buy an SSD drive for the boot and program files, but I've noted many of these drives come with their own cloning programme.
Note - if this is too long, feel free to edit!

Thanks, Bob, for another informative article. I love reading your newsletters, because I am learning a lot about computers and how they operate.

My friends are always asking me computer questions, so I just look back over your articles until I find the answer I need, then I tell them to sign up for your newsletters. ;)

Acronis ROCKS!

So please help me out, Bob. In a previous article you suggested EaseUS Todo Backup free version. It has a "Clone" option, which I always use for my backup. Does it work for the same purposes as the products mentioned above?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Yes, it should. I didn't mention Acronis and EaseUS, because they are more general purpose backup products. But they are excellent alternatives.

Remember that the clone is a true image, warts and all. Any spyware, viruses etc on the disk will be cloned too.

How about DriveImage XML. Makes images to files or Drive To Drive. Bootable. Even from a running system.

Interesting you say "For Linux users, the free and open-source Clonezilla is a good option." A friend recommended cloning my PC (Win7Pro single boot) with Clonezilla and the result says the clone is "good". Never had to reload from a clone (yet), but was told it would work. Should it work? Any ideas?

Clonezilla works great for Windows all flavors and does very nicely with Linux. It also works with HFS+ and does complete disk images of Mac. FREE

For Mac I use Carbon Copy Cloner all the way! Excellent tool.

"This is necessary because the cloning software cannot copy operating system files on the hard drive while they are in use,"

Wrong. There are many backup programs like Casper that use VSS, Volume System Service that instantly freeze a file, copy it, and unfreeze it. This happens so fast you never know it. And you backup drive is fully bootable, file by files, not a useless image that can only be accessed via another disk or process