What is a Hard Drive Clone?

A hard drive clone is an exact copy of another hard disk drive. Making an exact copy is also known as taking a disk image. The disk image can be manipulated in many ways. It can be compressed, split into parts, and copied onto multiple CDs. It can be copied to some other backup device. However, the most interesting application, is to use the image to make an identical hard drive.

If the original drive is bootable then the cloned drive will be bootable also. This can be a great advantage if you need a full backup of a disk but also want to get up and running quickly after a hard disk crash. Cloning a disk is also good for upgrading a from a smaller disk to a larger disk, making a copy of a disk that is about to fail, or just copying one disk partition to another. Just considering the possibilities makes a hard drive clone utility seem indispensable. You can make backups, you can copy partitions, you can upgrade your hard drive, and you can use it to do a data recovery.

Hard Drive Backup

The primary purpose of a backup is to help you recover from the disaster of losing data, whether it is a single file or an entire disk. Having a hard drive clone makes the recovery task a snap. The location of the cloned image will determine how easy your data recovery will be. You are not limited to restoring the entire disk, you can also extract individual files from the disk’s backup image. The image might be located on a bootable optical disk or an external USB hard drive. Or, you might even have a cloned disk that can be swapped for the broken unit. Good backup programs like StompSoft PC Backup give you the option of creating a bootable CD or DVD to help you restore from your backups.

Partition Copy

If you have multiple partitions on one disk, doing a hard drive clone can be more complicated. Good cloning software will allow you make copies of individual partitions. The operation of taking a disk image and taking a partition image are so closely related, that some cloning software will enable you to manipulate partitions in many more ways. Manipulating partitions can be especially useful when you’re about to do a hard drive upgrade.

Hard Drive Upgrade

You get a new computer or new bigger hard drive but you want to keep all the files and settings from your old drive, what do you do? The task of reinstalling your OS, reinstalling all of your software applications, and copying all of your data is a large task indeed. It could take several days by this method. The really hard part is doing all of the custom settings. It makes me tired just thinking of this big job. However, doing a hard drive clone is almost effortless. You merely use the cloning software to create an image on your new hard drive. In one step, you have your OS, data, and settings on the new disk ready for booting.

Data Recovery

When your hard drive starts to make grinding or clicking noises, it’s letting you know that total hard drive failure imminent and. The drive is in need of professional data recovery services. At this point, the hard drive only has a limited number reads left and it’s best to use those reads to recover as much data as possible. A hard drive clone program comes in handy at this point because the cloning operation will read the entire disk with the minimum of wear and tear on the hard drive. In the data recovery industry it is considered a best practice to work with an image of the failing disk rather than the disk itself. Don’t confuse file recovery with data recovery, file recovery is used to recover an accidentally deleted file from a healthy disk. Most file recovery programs are harmful to a disk that is physically failing because they cause the disk to do more work than is necessary and because they also write to the failing disk.

Wipe your Old Drive

If you’re done with your old drive, be sure to clean it by erasing the disk. Cleaning the hard drive will protect your privacy. You cannot clean a hard drive merely by formatting it or using the OS commands to delete all of the files. You need a special program that cleans the drive by overwriting all of the disk blocks at least once.

Hard Drive Cloning Software

• Acronis
  • Buy Acronis True Image 10.0
    
  • Acronis Migrate Easy
    
  
  
• Paragon
  Paragon Drive Copy 8.5 Personal Edition
  
  
• Norton Ghost
  Symantec Norton Ghost 12.0
  
  
• Easeus - Freeware
  EaseUs Disk Copy 1.0
  

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