How to Clone a Hard Drive

For backing up data, there’s no shortage of alternatives to choose from. Few, however, are as simple and straightforward as simply cloning your hard drive. If you need to copy all of your data, or want to safeguard against a corrupted or physically damaged hard drive, having a functional copy of the drive you can immediately turn to is hard to beat. And unlike some backup strategies, which require regular attention or convoluted tools, cloning a drive is a relatively uncomplicated affair
Tools and Utilities
For those who want to clone their drive directly, there are several tools available. Among the many backup utilities we’ve reviewed, our top pick is MiniTool partition wizard.
MiniTool Partition Wizard free edition is a piece of windows clone software helps you to copy hard drive to another without data loss. Actually, for MiniTool Partition Wizard, disk copy equals to disk clone, and it even provides Sector-by-Sector copy technology. So you don’t need to worry about the accident mentioned in the previous content after cloning a hard drive. Besides, this partition magic can be employed on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10, both 32 bit and 64 bit.

Destination Drive
Cloning a drive, or even saving a backup image, requires having someplace to save your data to. When backing up an entire drive, you’ll want to have a drive of equal or larger capacity set aside for backup, and nothing else. You have to real options: A bare hard drive, or an external drive.
A bare drive is exactly like the drive you already have in your laptop or desktop—it’s the actual drive, but not yet installed in a machine. Once you’ve acquired the drive, you can either install it as a second drive or purchase a compatible drive enclosure for it. These drives come in several physical sizes, meant for desktops or laptops, and both spinning hard drives and solid-state drives (SSD) are viable options. For cloning purposes, you’ll want a drive with at least as much memory as the data you’re cloning (the amount of used memory in the original drive). For example, if you only have 200GB of data stored on a 500GB drive, some cloning tools will let you clone the data to a drive smaller than 500GB, so long as there is space for all 200GB of data. For a drive that can literally be swapped for the one already in your PC, you’ll definitely want to get a drive that is the same size and connector type as the original.
The other option is to buy an external hard drive. These are self-contained drives, usually connected through a USB connection. External drives may be larger deskbound drives or pocket-sized portables, but they generally all will work as a suitable backup medium, and many will also offer additional features, such as encryption or automated backup software. For a detailed look at desktop and portable drives.
Clean Up Your Files
With both a backup utility and a drive to back up to, you’re ready to clone your drive, but this is also a good opportunity to do some digital spring cleaning. There’s plenty of data you want to back up, but chances are you also have plenty of stuff saved—drivers for old devices, programs that aren’t needed, media files you couldn’t care less about—that doesn’t need to be duplicated. For a great guide to getting your drive in tip top shape so that you aren’t cloning a disorganized mess.
Making the Clone
Once you’ve got your back up drive, cleaned up the digital detritus, and figured out your backup utility, it’s time to start cloning. Connect the destination drive, open up your backup utility, and follow the utility’s directions to copy the contents of your hard drive to the backup. Depending on the size of the drive to be cloned, the amount of data stored on the drive, and the speed of both the original and backup drives, this process may take anywhere from several minutes to several hours.
Caring for Clones
Once the drive is completely cloned you’re done—for now. What you have is an exact copy of the original at that moment in time. Any future changes in files, programs, or anything else will only be reflected on the original drive. Once you swap it for the clone, it will be like stepping back in time to the day you cloned the drive originally. For more up to date backup, you’ll want to schedule time to make a fresh clone at regular intervals—even if it’s just an annual copy for World Backup Day (every March 31st).
You also want to keep that cloned drive somewhere safe and accessible. For long term storage you’ll want to be especially careful to keep the drive safe from moisture, extremes in temperature, and static electricity or powerful magnets. A safe bet is to slip the drive into an anti-static bag and then store it the same way you would vital documents—in a safe or fire box. If you’re less concerned with immediate accessibility, you might also consider storing the drive off-site so that you have a backup to turn to in the event of fire, flood, or similar disaster.

.Preparatory work

• Make sure the target disk is successfully connected to the same computer;
• Make sure the storage space of the target disk is large enough to hold all the data in the source disk;
• Initialize the target disk to the same disk style with the source one;
• Make sure the data on the target disk have been backed up because all of them will be destroyed.

Steps of Cloning

Step 1: Launch MiniTool Partition Wizard. Right click the source partition you are going to clone and choose “Copy“. You can also choose “Copy Partition Wizard” in the left column.

Step 2: Then you should select a target disk to go on.

Step 3: In this page, four options are provided for you to customize the disk clone.

• Fit partitions to entire disk: automatically adjust the partition size to occupy the entire space of the target disk;
• Copy partitions without resize: only works when the target disk is larger than the source disk and will clone HDD Sector-by-Sector.
• Edit partitions on this disk: allow users to adjust the partition size during the process.
• Force to align partitions on this disk: this will improve the performance for Advanced Format disk & SSD.
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• Step 4: Copy Disk Wizard will tell you how to boot from the destination disk. If you are cloning the system disk, you should pay more attention. After that, click “Finish” to go back to the main interface.
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• Step 5: Here you can preview the changes you are going to make to the target disk. After confirmation, press “Apply” to make all the changes effective.
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• That’s all for Windows disk clone. In addition, you can also clone a partition by employing “Copy Partition Wizard“. After you have finished the clone, you can also resize/move/delete partition with free MiniTool Partition Wizard, which is indeed amazing freeware.
  

  Conclusion

  Windows disk clone is now a public demand, and MiniTool Partition Wizard is a great hard drive cloner. It is the best freeware with simple, fast and safe operations. Having such an excellent software available, why not download it to be your private assistant?