How to Clone a Hard Drive?

How to Clone a Hard Drive:

Many excellent services are available for backing up your files, but occasionally you need something a little more robust. You may want to make a complete one-to-one copy if something goes wrong or you move your Windows installation to a different disc. In those circumstances, your best option is to clone your hard disc to produce a replica that you can swap into or immediately boot up.

But only for Clone a Hard Drive in this manual. Check out one of the pricier choices if you want a simple backup solution with more cloning features. However, these tools will suffice if you only need to make one-off copies (such as when moving your OS to a different disc).

Link Your Secondary Drive

You will need two drives for this procedure: the source drive, which contains the data you wish to clone, and the destination drive, to which you are copying the data. If both discs are installed internally in the desktop computer (or if you're only copying to an external USB drive for backup purposes), You are prepared to proceed.

Windows Users: Utilise Macrium Reflect Free to Clone Your Drive

Many excellent cloning applications are accessible to Windows users, but we'll be utilising Macrium Reflect Free (Opens in a new window). It's difficult to make a mistake because it's free, simple to use, and well-liked by many.

When done, it will immediately start the Macrium installation wizard, which you may proceed through by clicking the default options, which should work well for our needs. Once the process is finished, you can manually uninstall all the installer files from your Downloads folder.

Start Cloning Procedure

You may view a comprehensive list of the discs attached to your computer by opening Macrium Reflect. Creating an image of a disc or physically copying one disc to another are your two major alternatives.

Cloning allows you to start your computer from a second disc when moving from one drive to another. Contrarily, imaging allows you to keep as many complete, identical copies of your source disc as the space at the target will support, which would be excellent for backups.

Select Clone Destination

Select your destination disc in the next box, which will hold the newly transferred data. Be careful which you select because doing so will delete all data on the disc. You might wish to pick it and click "Delete Existing Partitions" until the drive is empty, whether there is any old data on it.

Start up Using Your Cloned Drive

Macrium Reflect would then start the cloning procedure. Determined by the size of your drive, this could take some time, so give it some time. You should now be able to boot from your cloned drive by selecting it in your BIOS if you did so. You can leave the second drive attached if you're imaging your disc to use for backup images in the future.

You can hold down the Option key when your Mac boots up and choose your cloned drive from the boot list. You may work without missing a beat because your cloned drive will be in the exact condition that your computer was in during the cloning procedure.