As the title says “How to clone a Hard Drive“, Today, I will be discussing about the same. If you want to backup your data there are many alternatives available. One of them is cloning of hard disk and its is one of the easiest thing that you can do and backup your data and easily use it again.
Why to clone your hard drive?
There can be various answers to this question, one can say to copy all data, other can say to safeguard data from corruption or physical damage of hard drive. A hard disk is an electromechanical device (in case of old hard disks with spinning plates and a controller) and new type of hard drives also known as SSD(Solid State Drive), SSD does not contain any moving parts and is totally an electronic device. These hard disks can fail any time due to electronic or mechanical failures in them and you can loose your valuable data, To avoid these kind of circumstances a data backup is done by cloning of hard disks and Cloning of Hard disk is one of the easiest way to do that. Cloning of HDD will leave you with a functional copy of data and that is ready to use at any time you want either directly of restoring it to a different storage device.
Ways to clone
Typically we can do a Cloning process in 2 ways
- By creating a Clone of HDD or Partition of HDD
- By creating an Image of HDD or Partition of HDD
By creating a Clone of HDD or Partition of HDD
A Clone of HDD can be attained by copying data bit by bit, resulting an identical copy of data to a new hard disks or hard drive. The copied to new Hard disk will be so much identical that you can swap the new copied HDD with the old one and you won’t see any difference, It will work like it was working earlier, All the content of source drive will be there on the cloned drive. Say you have songs , hidden files, or operating system files, all will be copied as it is on the source to the new cloned HDD.
By creating an Image of HDD or Partition of HDD
This way of cloning is a kind of snapshot of data or a copy of data of one Hard disk that is stored on another Hard disk. It is like creating a big archive for storage, that later you can restore to another hdd. You can created images at multiple time and save them to a different Hard drives. This image is not functional immediately , you need to restore it to some device or Hard disk to use.
How to clone HDD?
To Clone a HDD we need some tools and utilities. You will find many application which are capable for doing the cloning, I am mentioning some best and reliable application which you can use to perform cloning
- Acronis Backup & Recovery
- Macrium Reflect Free
- ShadowCopy
- Clonezilla
- EaseUS Todo Backup Free
- Mini Partition tools
- Any many more
These applications are easy to use and can be used to create a Clone in 2-3 steps. Many of these applications can be used to create a working copy of operating system. I will be creating a post on creating a clone of Operating system in future.
Requirement for performing HDD Clone
The first and foremost requirement to clone a Hard disk or create an image is to have a Hard disk with same or more capacity to store the copied data. Its can be achieved by using a blank external or Internal HDD of same or more capacity. Some tools allow to create partition on a larger Hard disk and copy data on them, the remaining space can be utilized to store other things.
