Best way to mirror a drive and keep OS?

prayshadow · October 17, 2021

Hi guys, I'm looking for the best way to upgrade the NVMe SSD in my laptop but keep an exact copy of what I have on the current drive, operating system and all. I'm running Windows 10 on an XPS 9570. I've done the typical Google search but I've come up with about 20 different methods, about half of which involve programs that cost money. I wanted to know what the best way to do this is according to people who've actually done it. I have another computer, my desktop, so I could theoretically get two NVMe to USB adapters and plug them both into that if it would be any easier. Thanks in advance for your help.

RONOTHAN## · October 17, 2021

The only way I personally trust to clone a Windows drive is something called "Clonezilla". It's a bootable USB that does a bit for bit transfer of data from one drive to another, so as long as the source drive is the same size or smaller than the destination drive, this will work perfectly. You either need both drives connected to the same computer (I don't think there are any true NVMe to USB adapters, most of them are just M.2 SATA to USB, so you'll need a way to put them both in the system itself) or a intermediary drive to put an image of the first drive on, then restore the image with the new drive installed.