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Best drive cloning software?

lafrente
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I want to copy an HDD that has Windows and partitions to another HDD. What software should I use? I want something headache free and easy to use. And preferably free since I don't do this very often. 

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2 minutes ago, BiotechBen said:

Macrium Reflect works great for 1:1 copies. I didn't rtfm and it gave a headache, if you rtfm: it's one of the easiest programs to use.

What was the issue?

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I use AOMEI software, easy to use too

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8 minutes ago, lafrente said:

What was the issue?

Me thinking I didn't have to read directions on how the program works and just click menus until I found what I wanted to do. Mostly Microsoft being stupid and putting recovery partition at the end of the drive. AOMEI is gonna be needed if you are copying to a larger drive because of that exact issue.

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i use macrium reflect and it works good, the scheduling feature is used every day for my windows SSD backup images, although incremental backups and some other features arent available in the free version which is perfectly reasonable. 

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I still keep a copy of Minitool Partition Wizard 11 around, I swear every single one of the 'free' tools I find now won't let you do simple shit like copy partitions or disks without paying. Of course they don't tell you that until you install it and try to use it....

why no dark mode?
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I like Macrium Reflect also - it does not need to boot to some separate environment, just uses "volume shadow copy" feature, and clones all the partitions in OS.

I edit my posts more often than not

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Does no one use Clonezilla anymore? You know, the free open source software whose entire purpose is to clone drives for the past 15 years? God I'm old...

https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

 

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1 minute ago, TetraSky said:

Does no one use Clonezilla anymore? You know, the free open source software whose entire purpose is to clone drives for the past 15 years? God I'm old...

https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

 

Macrium Reflect is a tad better - you don't need to boot to special environment and can use PC while cloning.

I edit my posts more often than not

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3 minutes ago, Tan3l6 said:

Macrium Reflect is a tad better - you don't need to boot to special environment and can use PC while cloning.

I guess I'm the weird one for wanting to clone outside of windows because I don't trust the OS to not mess it up somehow. 😅

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3 minutes ago, TetraSky said:

Does no one use Clonezilla anymore? You know, the free open source software whose entire purpose is to clone drives for the past 15 years? God I'm old...

https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

 

I've tried, but its interface is a pain in the butt. (Which tracks, it's an open source project after all! /s)

 

 

I still use an old copy of Ghost, because I have its commands committed to muscle memory.

 

I sold my soul for ProSupport.

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I've used Macrium Reflect with no issues in the past. Clonezilla is also a fine, tried and tested tool. Otherwise you can get an external drive dock that is capable of cloning just by pressing a button and having both the source drive and target drive plopped in.

 

Something like this - see spoiler -

Spoiler

image.thumb.png.99d99bf806ee360cfc849434ae9b1ef2.png

 

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23 hours ago, TetraSky said:

Does no one use Clonezilla anymore? You know, the free open source software whose entire purpose is to clone drives for the past 15 years? God I'm old...

https://clonezilla.org/downloads.php

 

I still use Clonezilla and it's very good software 🙂

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Posted (edited)
23 hours ago, Tan3l6 said:

I like Macrium Reflect also - it does not need to boot to some separate environment, just uses "volume shadow copy" feature, and clones all the partitions in OS.

Macrium Reflect gives you the option to use a recovery environment. Like most backup software, it's not required to clone a drive, but if you want a bootable copy, I'd still highly recommend using the recovery environment. The last clone I did failed because I did it online (i.e. Windows was still running off the drive I was cloning) and the resulting clone wasn't bootable. I tried again from the recovery environment and it worked perfectly.

 

That said, this is the first time I've had this issue. Every other time I've done an online clone with Macrium, it's been bootable. But to be safe, going forward I'm doing all my boot drive clones offline.

Edited by kenblu24
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