Clone? an Entire Drive

[Guest]

So... I was wondering if it's possible (I'm sure it is) to make a copy of an entire drive and all of the data on it. Not just partitions, but everything on the drive. Like basically an exact replica. I think this is called "cloning" but I figure I should check to be sure. And also, if it is possible, what tool should I use to do this? 

[Guest]

@Boogieman_WD 

 

You guys are storage experts, right? I figure you might have a tool or an answer for something like this. 

[alexhelvetica]

Clonezilla. I believe the drive you are cloning has to be smaller than the drive you are cloning it onto.

[stconquest]

Free, ad free and works:  http://clonezilla.org/

 

 

[MrPants_]

I can confirm, Clonezilla works great for transferring the stuff on your old computer to a new computer! It might be a bit confusing but if you read very closely it's very easy to use!

 

[Guest]

Okay so it is called cloning though, right? Like this type of process 

[stconquest]

Just now, IAmLamp said:

Okay so it is called cloning though, right? Like this type of process 

Yup.

[squirrl]

You can use Partition Wizard as well. (https://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html)

You can make a bootable device or use it from the OS. It allows you to modify/clone partitions as well as whole drives, and also if the source drive is bigger than the destination it still allows you to clone as long as there is enough free space on the source drive.

For example, 1x 1tb partition (500GB used) and 2x 500GB partitions (100GB used on each) 

This adds up to 2TB total disk space, but only 700GB used. You can then transfer this across to a 750GB or 1TB drive.

[Guest]

Is Clonezilla like the best one out there? 

[stconquest]

7 minutes ago, IAmLamp said:

Is Clonezilla like the best one out there? 

It does the job and is 100% free.  It has been around a long while.  It is a capable program.

 

There are other ones that have nice features, like automatic backups, but you pay for them.  Acronis True Image is a pay suite.

[Guest]

Gave Test EaseUS Todo Backup Free a shot and it worked fine. It's got a nice GUI interface which is what I'm looking for. I'll keep that other one in mind though. 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hi there!

Well, basically you've already figured out everything and the guys gave you some pretty good pointers. There are a lot of cloning/migration software options out there and it's basically up to personal preference. Here's another video on how to clone a drive with a different example:

@squirrl gave you a pretty important piece of advice, because this is really helpful, especially nowadays when everyone is migrating their OS storage drive from an HDD over to an SSD, which in most cases is smaller in capacity than the source drive. So keep in mind the fact that you can clone a larger drive over to a smaller one as long as the data is not larger in size than the maximum available capacity of the destination drive. Good job!

Cheers!
Boogieman_WD

[Bond_009]

U can use DD on linux.

Example: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/disk_cloning

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Bond_009 said:

U can use DD on linux.

Example: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/disk_cloning

Arch Linux ROFL

[Bond_009]

5 hours ago, IAmLamp said:

Arch Linux ROFL

You can use a live CD from any distro to do it.